Excuse me here: but holy sh*te.

I just ran my mic through it about 20 minutes ago. My hair is still on end.

Any of you who were reading my posts from the last month know that I've been asking a lot of mic opinions because I thought my Blue baby Bottle was little tubby and dark. You may have heard me say that I wasn't thrilled with it. That I was thinking of a new mic.

Well, I got to some deep, meta-plane level of thinking about it, and (God bless me) I decided it was my preamp that needed changing. So, I sold my joemeek (VC1Qcs) on ebay to a very nice guy.

The thing is, is now my mic sounds about 10x better. It sounds like a different mic. Stated more properly, the MP5.0 is allowing my mic to come through. I bought the mic because I tried one at GC, and it was my favorite $500 mic--but it never sounded good at my place. I am now happy, across the board, with my sound. This mic preamp is a great match.

The MP5.0 has all *kinds* of options. You have a sweepable hi-pass from 30-250Hz. This is going to be very handy to deal with any proximity effect from any singer/source. It has your basic mic preamp things: 11 postion gain switch in 5dB steps from +10 to +60dB, and a -/+10dB trim knob. Switches are -20dB pad, Mic/DI select, +48V phantom, and transformer balanced or active balanced output selector. There's also this "Mix Node" section that you use when hooking up several of these together, but I'm not doing that.

The VU meter is a 10-segment LED that has a nifty aspect--it's slightly curved upwards in the center, so that when it lights up, it feels a little more like a real meter.

I'm not done talking about this, but I have to go now. I'll post more about this great pre later.

best-
.nick