I'm not familiar with the MOTU stuff, but the upshot is you want to use a low impedance input for a mic, otherwise you won't have enough gain to work with. 1/4" inputs are generally high Z. You'd be best off buying a fourway or larger mic preamp and feeding the outputs of that into your available 1/4" inputs, assuming they can be set to line level.

You can record a microphone's output through the back, but you will need some kind of preamp. The level of signal coming out of the mic is very low and the 1/4 inputs on the back expect a much louder signal such as what would come from a keyboard or CD player. The two XLR inputs on the front have preamps built in that give the mic's signal gain before it is recorded. You should look into buying a multichannel preamp. Most of these have 1/4" outputs, so you could plug your mics into the preamps, then plug the preamp outputs into the 1/4" inputs on the 828. As for which multichannel preamp to buy, you will find lots of opinions by using the [="http://www.recording.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=search"]search[/]="http://www.recordin…"]search[/] feature. I haven't heard this pre, but you might want to look into the [[url=http://="http://www.studiopr…"]Studio Projects SP828[/]="http://www.studiopr…"]Studio Projects SP828[/]. It would be a good match for the MOTU, in I/O and in name ;)

thanks

Thanks so much for the fast response and helpfull info.

I checked out the SP828 web site. Looks nice and ZZounds has it for only $599.

Could another alternative be to use a small mixer board with Lo-Z XLR (w/ phantom power) inputs that have 1/4" (line level) outputs?

Yes, that would work also, but most of the small format mixers have pretty crappy pres. Also, the SP828 basically is a mixer, although it is not a flexible routing wise as a small format mixer would be.

Good point. And it's rack-mounted so it takes up less space too.

I picked up a book called, "Practical Recording Techniques" by Bartlett. It has explained alot. I guess I just missed where it explained the difference or what it means - balanced and unbalanced.

Could you explain the difference between balanced / unbalanced?

Hey, grifitti, reread that last post of mine. I think I made an edit while you were typing - this is almost like real-time chat!

Balanced has three conductors, two for signal and one is a shielded ground. It has a couple of advantages. It will reject noise from power cords to nearby gear and also from RF sources. A long unbalanced mic cable will cost you high frequency content also, because it's a crude capacitor, whereas a balanced line will not lose high frequencies over a long run.

Thanks jonyoung.

Hey David, I also found a mic preamp by PreSonus...the DigiMAX LT. It looks pretty cool. I can pipe the output to my MOTU 828 via ADAT lightpipe, leaving my existing 8 1/4" MOTU inputs free for other stuff.

http://www.presonus.com/digimax_lt.html

Anyone have any experience with either the SP828 or the DigiMAX LT ?