[stakeoutstudios]

Hi guys, I'd appreciate your thoughts on this preamp.

I've had it for a couple of weeks now, sitting next to my Manley MP40/2.

I'm just a bit disappointed with the head room in this pre - literally less than my behringer MX8000 (gasp)

After reading reviews, I thought a great place to start would be snare and kick drum - the kick drum was OK with the Shure beta 52 (it's got a fairly low output). However, on snare I like to use a Neumann KMS105. The mic-pre simply couldn't hack it and left a messy distorted sound. I was still having problems when I switched the mic for a Shure Beta 57, although to a much lesser degree.

Next test for the mic-pre was guitar amps, and bass amps. The preamp distorted straight away with RODE NT1000, NT1, and the audio Technica 4050/CM5. The pad on the 4050 improved the situation a bit, but it still wasn't great.

The latest test was a Roland XP80, playing hammond sound into the front inputs.

This worked OK and sounded great, but when we used less negative feedback, we had to lower to output of the keyboard to prevent clipping in the mic preamp. I just feel a bit restricted by this, as it closes a lot of the tonal options I bought the preamp for.

Incidentally, every situation here worked great and sounded great on the Manley preamp... No clipping.

So far the best use of the 2-610 has been for drum overheads with RODE NTK's which sound great and don't seem to clip.

I'm just wondering if there is so little headroom in such a high-end preamp, why on earth haven't they implemented a PAD switch?!

it's not complicated really!

have any of you got PAD boxes that you can use on a mic? I'm thinking this might be the only way round, unless I get the preamp modded to include a pad switch!

cheers,
Jason