Hi everyone, just got an account here because this site seems to have great users that are very knowledgeable with lots of gear. I hope some of the user's can hep me here. I'm currently selling a lot of my gear and have around $2000 to $3000 to spend on a quality mic preamp or some type of DI to get me the sound I need.

I want nice tight fat kick drums and beats for Hip Hop, Pop, Dance and electronica type of music. Plugging my Korg Triton, Motif, AKAI sampler directly to my Mackie 8 bus doesn't seem to give me the sound I want and outputting it to my Trident S20 doesn't improve the punch of the low end frequencies altough the Trident does give me a lot of air and opens up the mids in my tracks.

I did owned the Avalon VT747, VT737, and a Focusrite ISA 428 and sold them cause they weren't what I'm looking for. Currently, I only have an Trident S20 preamp but it doesn't have instrument inputs.

I'm thinking about getting the Manley tube DI and connecting it to my S20, or Great River, or Universal Audio 2-610 ? Would any of these do ?

I record to DP3 in OS9 using MOTU 1224 card via the analog inputs with no external compression and I bypass the console's EQ. Should I be getting better converters like the Apogee Rosetta or Lucid 24/96 converters too ?

Also have the TC Powercore and UAD card with their plugins for my compression.

Thanks for any help... 8)