A company who's interfaces I have been using for about two years now, has a quality preamp they have designed to work with DAW systems, it has a peak indicator custom designed to stay below clipping levels of DAWs, while also giving the mic a pumped up tube sound.

The product is called "Tampa" and can be found here: http://www.midiman.com/products/m-audio/tampa.php

Good luck!

D.Mouatt
Studio Land

tnx essex,
i will test this unit. so far on my list are also avalon 737sp and mindprint dtc. do you have any experience with those? and what about Universal Audio UAD-1 powered plugins? Is it any good?

tnx again,

chris

Well the Avalons are very nice and smooth on the import, however they are none to cheap when it comes to retail purchase. the cheapest I have seen one for is about $900 and it came with no tubes.

The good thing about the tampa is that it is low noise and is user defined meaning you can digitaly set say a "Drum tone" and save it for future use with other non-DAW designed units you may run into having to spend a lot more and in the process spend more time getting "that sound".

Many different routes so many choices.
Investigate>compare>decide.

Good Luck!!

D.Mouatt
Studio Land

Yeah, avalons are expensive. On of my friends that is new to recording got one from somewhere but I can use it whenever I want. I made a number of recordings with it already so I can highly recommend it to my other friend. If he's got the money, he should get it. I also heard about this Mindprint DTC dual channel unit that it sounds amazing. I want to investigate this. Unfortunately, nobody I asked so far used it. I did listen to it in the store but that's not enough. Renting it is way too expensive for me. I will rent it only if I hear from couple of people that it is worth it.
You know...Tampa may be actually "optimal" but for my friend. He's using echo mona sound card which is not really hi-end thing. There is no comparison in sound quality to my RME ADI-8DS. That's why I'm thinking that upgrading mona to RME and getting Tampa for him would make more sense than getting Avalon without upgrading sound card. What do you think?

chris

In my opinion the card/interface can have a lot to do with it. The echo stuff isn't all bad as far as I have heard unless it's just the straught card into a slow system.

I would say for prices and performance try looking into the manufacturers of the Tampa (m-audio) audio cards. I have 4 of the delta 1010 units (around $800 for card and 8-input interface)
and they shine, throw in a tampa and a good board and you have got a pretty well oiled recording machine that can handle just about anything (depending on your mic cabinet.)

I hope this helps, you have some good cards yourself, for your friend, it depends on cost,system and what he's doing.

D.Mouatt
Studio Land

tnx, Essex. I will certainly check out Tampa.

chris

I use a Mindprint DI-port, 2 channel mic or instrument pre with analog, spdif, and optical I/O. About $400. The pres are extremely clean, and it has a very versatile monitoring section with headphone amp, plus separate 1/4" TRS and RCA stereo ins and outs, beside the balanced mic/instrument ins and digital. The only thing I don't like is that the input controls are small with a very wide gain range, so it's hard to balance the channels really accurately without useing tones and a voltmeter. It's very small and compact, and as long as you don't need higher than 24 bit 48khz, it's hard to beat for the money.

Brian