My conclusion after testing 4 preamps

[nick-the-sax]

Originally Posted by chrisrnps

Same here.

Gentlemen, when you appear here and elsewhere as 'the face of the company', what comes out of that face's piehole makes a lasting impression on potential customers.

If you choose not to let your products "speak for themselves", every comment you make online is not only 'forever', it's taken as the voice of the company. And there are plenty of other $1000-and-up this-year's-best-two-channel-preamps-ever to choose from.

agreed...

and on another note.. i never knew what "Slew" meant.. still a little confused, but it's still interesting to read nonetheless. on the whole (aside from the rather childish playground-style squabbling) a very interesting thread!

[nukmusic]

Originally Posted by djanogil

I have four different preamps;

-UA2108
-DAV BG1
-TAB V78M
-A Design Pacifica

Since I'm not too busy at the moment, I made some comparative recordings of finger picked ac. guitar and drums OH.
I did that because I realised that I didn't really know how each preamp sounds.
They all sound good, and I wanted to be able to qualify them to make more considered choices when choosing which one to use in sessions.
My conclusion is that they all have different characters and colours, but not to a point where any of them would be unsuitable for a particular source.
What I mean is I think any good preamp can do a great job at recording anything, and that it doesn't matter so much as long as it's a quality Pre.

Now I'm wondering how much a difference I would hear with preamps costing twice as much, like high end Tube pres; D.W Fearn, Mercury, Pendulum etc..
Also could you explain what do people mean when qualifying a Preamp as fast or slow, does that refer to how sharp the transients are captured?

there it is...

and don't ever let anyone tell you any differently, no matter who they are.

Originally Posted by UPRYZ

My take: The difference between 2 quality preamps - subtle
The difference between 2 microphones - say, a SM7 and a KM184 - not subtle
The difference between a treated and untreated room - nowhere near subtle.
The difference between a nice, well setup guitar and a sloppy cheap one - not subtle
When you think about it like that - it's clear where your dough should go.

Daniel Fox

yes yes yes

[rocksure]

Jeepers there's an underlying current that's emerged in this thread that I don't like. It puts me off, and leads me to agree with Brainchild.

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by nick-the-sax

i never knew what "Slew" meant.. still a little confused

It's not complicated. We all know about clipping distortion, where at some point the gain is set higher than the circuit can handle. So the tops of the peaks are clipped.

Slew rate limiting is a different type of "overload." In this case, the output can't keep up with the input, even at levels below clipping. So a sine or square wave gets turned into a triangle wave. This image is from the Wiki page someone else linked earlier:



Technically, slew rate limiting happens when the "driving" part of the circuit can't supply enough current to handle whatever capacitance is present in a subsequent stage. So fast transitions are slowed down by the lack of available current.

--Ethan

[anguswoodhead]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but...
It seems that the bigger (more headroom?) the transformers the better?
Less distortion and slew?
More natural sound,

Not as much distortion could mean not as much 'colour'?


How does this relate to a real world selection of a mic pre to suit a source?
Or are you guys saying that any pre can be used on any source and will capture it well? (as long as it's not Mackie or Behringer - LOL)
What makes API good on drums?
What makes Neve good for overheads?

[Dove]

Where you really hear the effects of slew rate is on a power amp.

Snap baby snap!

[spicemix]

The elephant in the middle of the preamp room is the specific impedance profile going in and coming out of the unit. Different mics are going to interact with different preamps to different degrees. For instance, ribbon mics are very sensitive to impedance in general, while condensers are less so.

Furthermore, when a preamp is driven into a nonlinear state, any nonlinearities upstream and downstream will also form crucial interactions. Guitar players know this well from experimenting with stacking distortions atop each other.

And that's a reason I think every audio engineer should play with guitar pedals and amps and cabinets and pickups. It's a wonderful little lab where everything about gain structure and impedance etc. is all made quite plain, and you get to hear immediately what it might mean musically; perhaps recognizing some tones from favorite songs.

What's true of a guitar preamp is also true of a mic preamp, though far more subtle. It may be possible to arrange tones that are fairly similar on different examples of each, but doing so is scarcely the point.