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Originally Posted by Dog_Chao_Chao  Hi Lynn. I think I heard your preamp shootout cd 3 times now (in my studio with some great monitoring and acoustics). Thanks for that.It was an experience to me. It showed me that, IMHO, preamps are being a bit overrated. Its pretty hard to tell the difference between an $800 to a $5000 preamp sometimes... |
Well at 800/ channel I think most pre's are all "high-end". I don't think pre's are overrated though. Maybe in the respect that there might not be 4200 "more good", but what DOES matter is that sometimes a great pre is flat wrong for a particular source where another is just fine to great... those "When it works, there's nothing like it" tools.
Let's take the buzz in this test. A few of us noticed a weirdness in the mids. On this voice using the Peluso, it mattered to me. It could be something with the voice, the mic, or the pre, but they added up funny, hell it could have been a special impedence match thing combined with the voice. I pointed out that even the same anomoly could actually be great for bass, and I'll say the same is robably true for an acoustic guitar. It might also be something you'd never hear on a different voice.
Personally, I haven't found something that slays on my voice, but I have heard things that are really bad for it. People like the M49, but that thing makes my voice have the funkiest sound in the highs, because I have a very high, very focused, resonance that needs to be tamed, not accurately presented, and definitely not accentuated. But when people say it's warm, I'm like "Not on my voice".
In the "High End", maybe there's not so frequently a magic bullet as there is magically not sucking when others are not doing the job. For example, I really like my Germaniums on guitar, not just because they sound good in general, but because they make a '57 suck the least on my amps with my settings. 57's are so pinched and hurtful to me on my rig, and the Germs remove that.