Mic Pres, along with mics and other front end gear, more than anything else, impact the way your recordings sound. Unlike the latest digital piece of junk they can last a lifetime.
Recordists are still using mics, preamps and compressors that are 40 years old and these pieces still retain their value while no one wants that 20 bit Pro Tools Mix Farm card you bought 3 years ago for $2000! But you don’t have to find a vintage piece that may need recapping or a lot of other work and that you won’t feel like you can rely on! There are many new designs/reissues/clones that fall into this category also. The common thing all high quality mic pres and compressors have is high power consumption resulting in high headroom. I am not a tech so I can’t explain it very well but EveAnna Manly says, “Joules Man! Joules!” There just is no getting around it. You gotta have massive power supplies to get that headroom, bandwidth and those linear operation characteristics.
Presently there is just no way to make this stuff inexpensively. I don’t think there ever will be. This stuff costs, plain and simple. But there really is no better and cost efficient way to audio Nirvana. The high end converters, sound cards, software are all wonderful, but if you are feeding them crap, that’s what they will put back out. There is no “digital goodualtor”!
So quit goofing around, trying to cheap out with your mics and preamps while spending a bundle on the next version of Pro Tools, new computers and things with blinking lights that are destined for the scrap heap within a few short years. Bite the bullet and learn what the hit makers have known for years. Almost every top flight engineer that is working the majors is traveling with their own racks of mic pres, comps and a cases of vintage and high end microphones. Even Bob Rock who has his own SSL console has a rack of Neve modules! All the other stuff is superfluous.
There are some companies that are making some killer stuff at very reasonable prices. I think a good rule of thumb is that quality mic pres run somewhere around $500 per channel at the very least. But there are a few companies that have broken this price barrier while still maintaining quality. Sebatron and JLM are two that come to mind. The JLM TMP 8
http://www.jlmaudio.com is an 8 channel solid state mic pre in the ilk of APIs and is currently priced at $1500. That is $187.50 per channel! JLM is upgrading these great pres to be Pro Tools controllable and this new product is slated to hit the market in July 2003! Now I agree this is not peanuts! $1500 is a lot of cash for many of us but it is the economy of scale that is making these things so cheap at the per channel price. You can’t achieve this with a single or dual channel unit. Sebatron is manufacturing excellent tube mic pres in a quad box (the vmp – 4000) that retail for $1497 and as a dual unit (the vmp – 2000) at $850!
http://www.sebatron.com This is still far below the $500 per channel benchmark and I can say these are absolutely wonderful sounding mic pres. There is nothing else you could do to improve the quality of your recordings for so little cash!
Not only are these companies manufacturing great products but their owners have been very generous with their time here at RO, answering questions and contributing to topic threads. They both have excellent customer service programs. These are the kinds of people I enjoy doing business with.
I advise all of you to consider this and hopefully go get yourself set up with some
great front end gear. Kurt
