The drum overhead picked up the singing, and the vocal mic did a great job on the snare!

Sorry that this thread has died down a bit. It was going great guns there for a bit.

My experience with devices in a chain tends more towards the effect of the circuitry on the source and the signal rather than the name on the box.

Some of the REASONS for this 'warmth' and all these other expletives describing something that has to be experienced rather than talked about. (Who said that famous phrase...."Trying to describe sound is like dancing about architecture")....anyway...THE CIRCUIT is the thing. And it imparts measurable effect. It is either fast or slow depending upon the design, so it either gives the signal to your ears, nearly in time or it retards it somewhat.

Retarded signals make it easier for your brain to select how to react to the hearing of the signal. It also allows for the 'smearing' of the source. Quality components in the device control the electrical smearing and retain the fidelity all the while allowing the speed of the reproduction to be slower. It is not only measurable but in most cases apparent.

Is it important? Sometimes.

As engineers.....some are really engineers, some aren't in the reality of the word......OK manipulators of source material through electronic devices.....engineers, we seek out mechanical devices which make our jobs (passions) easier and more relevant to our goals, which is clean and clear recordings of source material. Capturing sound through the air onto selected media. Reproduction of musical works with the intent to distribute as product in a marketplace. etc......Those having experience at these things will always have an opinion of the gear based on their own human experience at it. One will never be the same as another. Even at the same circumstance simply because we are all different people with different people brains and all that.....How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? This was asked in another thread as a joke and the answer is actually, All Of Them.

I can make records on anything that will effectively capture the mic's input. As paulears says, the LARGEST difference in sound will be the movement and choice of the transducer capturing the sound at the point of the capture. This is a GIVEN. I, too, have Beatles outtakes and other tracks that were never intended for release. The true quality of the ARRANGING and the SONGWRITING becomes very clear with these because the CAPTURES aren't much different than anyone else would have gotten in those rooms with that gear. There's nothing particularly spectacular or game changing about the mic placements or the tonality of the console. You can hear that the room is what is making this happen and then you realize how much thought went into making the final mixes and release levels of these very same songs become the treasures they are.

And then you hear Frank Sinatra recordings on MONO with an orchestra at Western Recorders and everything in the sound is pure and clear and theres NOTHING MISSING....."Let's play till we get it right".......

Yeah. Remy gets boring with ' I did this an that'..... BUT the truth is, as an engineer you do what you have to to get the job done....just like mixing in someones basement on a Mackie with two channels iffy and crosstalk on five and six.....

And maybe some people have "golden ears" ...I don't know....I hear a LOT of crap in recordings and in the process of mixing something....I will push the envelope to get a sound to stand out.....I like real good gear because it really is clearer, but dirt is basic and someone else's ears aren't going to distinguish between a Samson condenser and a vintage Neumann on a good song and on a bad song no one cares anyway! Our delivery systems these days are "low-grade dog food" (name that movie quote!!!) and no one cares (general public). People are way too busy and moving around much too much to allow LISTENING with their EARS (for God's sake) at anything that doesn't pulse with enough thump to get them through a day of computer screen work. Earbuds, ultra minature speaker systems, time aligned indirect subwoofered society doesn't give a shit about what preamp you used to get the latest story about Da Hoe's in Da Crib....BUT...

I'm still buying Manley gear anyways.

we are still discussing mic pres, right? the mic pre is the most important point in a recording chain after the mic choice. why? because the pre is where the voltage is stepped up from mic level to line level. it requires the most voltage of all tasks, the largest demand on the power supply. "joules man! joules!" a pre with a 9 volt wall wart ain't gonna cut it!

beyond the ability to distort a pre intentionally for effect there are still other considerations that apply even if you would "never do that."

budget pres are limited in useable range ("narrow sweet spot") and have to be fine tuned by the operator to optimum for satisfactory results, because when they crap out it not pretty. set it too low, it's noisy. set it to high and it distorts unpleasantly.

fiddling with several "budget" mic pres on a session takes time .. if you are rushed / under pressure, chances for error are greater and something may be either be too noisy or crap out of head room ...

for example, when tracking a large ensemble with 20 union musicians being paid triple scale, (such as a Sinatra session) everyone is under pressure because it's costing a ton. and Frank was never one for ..."Let's play till we get it right"... he was very demanding and infamous for refusing to do second takes ... as far as he was concerned he did it right, everyone else better have as well. and if he was forced to do retakes, you better hope he likes what he did on the second take more than what he did on the first. Putnam was under a lot of pressure to get right and get it quick. Dylan is the same way. just record it dammit!... what's the problem???

and i can imagine "clients" who would be pissed if you missed a performance they loved for the sake of a technical issue. ... the great thing about those old designs ("wide sweet spot") was they could overload gracefully ... in a musical way.

if all you are doing is playing with yourself in your "bedroom studio", i guess that's not an issue. you can beat that horse until you get it. when you start working with paying clients with discerning ears,who demand you be at your best you better be able to gloss over the tech issues. and that is why all mic pres are not the same.

I'm checking the test now.. Did anybody do the test?

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct12/articles/preampsmedia.htm

I'm not sure what that guys video was about.... there's definitely differences in the pres... Whether or not you prefer one pre over another is alot different than saying it doesn't matter.