[danasti]

I don't know if anyone has brought this up but I was just doing some googling on Ray Charles, Atlantic and Tom Dowd and ran into this... It has nothing to do with Atlantic and Tom but is later one when Ray met digital..

Do you remember if you used a particular preamp after the mic in Ray's vocal chain?

Yeah. Typically, for vocals, we would use a Universal Audio LA-2A. We'd use the mic pre off the mixing board. By that time, when I was doing most of his engineering, we'd switched from a Sound Workshop console to a Quad/Eight console. And the Quad/Eight had some improved mic pres that Ray really liked. Ike would always bring over mic pres to Ray, to try and have him switch over to an outboard mic pre, and we would A/B them, and the mic pre in the Quad/Eight board was always, as Ray would say, “Good enough.” In other words, the outboard pre wasn't spectacular enough to make him change. There was a difference between the Sound Workshop model and the Quad/Eight, because the Quad/Eight had 56 inputs. That's when we went into a 48-track digital recorder. We bought one of the first Studer digital tape recorders.

So he'd go from the mic into the Quad/Eight's preamp and then through the LA-2A?

Yes

http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_recording_genius/