Yes, Matt, it will help, if the preamp is any good (the tube pre isn't so hot either). Remember that the Roland is a $2000 box, and even fair pres start at about $500 per channel. Really good ones are more like $1000 per channel. What will help more is to go in by S/PDIF, 2 tracks at a time, and bypass the preamps completely. There are 3 ways to do this. One- Get a preamp with S/PDIF out, using its own convertor. I use a Joemeek twinQ for that. MAudio Tampa will work. Two- (the best way, but not the cheap way)- Get a much better convertor, such as Lucid AD2496, and plug whatever preamp you have into that, and go to the Roland by S/PDIF. That bypasses the preamps *and* upgrades the convertor. Three (the cheap way)- Buy a TC Electronics M300, plug your preamp into that, press the "bypass" button, and send S/PDIF out to the Roland from the M300. The M300 is a rather useful $200 FX box that will give you an outboard reverb, delay, rudimentary compressor, flanger, de-esser, and makeup gain. It is not a great A-D convertor, but it is about as good as the one in the Roland. So you don't lose much, if anything, in the convertor, but it allows you to bypass the Roland's pres completely. Downside to all of those techniques- You can only go into the Roland's S/PDIF with 2 tracks at a time. For more than 2, plug whatever pres you have into the channel ins and set them for "line", as you say. That won't completely bypass the Roland's pres, but the more gain you get out of those pres, the worse they get. For drums, send the overheads in by S/PDIF, and the rest as line ins. "The rest" should be as few tracks as possible- namely kick and snare.
I made an entire commercial CD that way, and it will work. A whole bunch of that album was done with an Avalon AD2022 going into an M300, and then to the Roland by S/PDIF. The more you can get around the Roland's pres, the better it will sound. I recorded en entire album on a VS1824CD, and at no time were the preamps ever turned up from "line". The only stuff that ever went through the line ins was kick and snare. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked. -Richie
