For reference: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/preamp-post-mortemSoundOnSound magazine had a blind listening comparison of microphone pre's a few years back.
He bought a vintage mixing console and made a big deal of installing it in their new building. They built a studio using what could only be called random acoustic principles.what is the connection between Paul and Studer?
Should that be RAP, Random Acoustic Principles without feedback!He bought a vintage mixing console and made a big deal of installing it in their new building. They built a studio using what could only be called random acoustic principles.
what is the connection between Paul and Studer?
Pro are following the same folklore as audiophile. they also do not like double blind test. There is nothing to hear there. Gearslutz,is,full of people raving about Masselec or SPL (add your favorite brand) eq or compressors. They are very close to each other’s and also very close to plugins. Btw the better the hardware is, the closer it is to plugins.
what I like with physical buttons is that it is easier to concentrate without looking at a screen. Sound wise there is almost no diff (but analogue hardware is a PITA to use wrt to daw+plugins).
end of rant.
what is the connection between Paul and Studer?
YMMD (2nd today).psaudio sells noise harvesters...
"What's the connection?" you might ask.
Well, given the various laws of matter, energy and, information conservation, the harvested noise has to go somewhere.
I suspect it is collected at psaudio HQ and then offloaded in their videos.
I wanted to buy a good quality mic preamp in our local pro shop to put in front of my RME ADI-2 PRO fs as it has no mic input so I could use my Behringer ECM8000. The dealer more or less said that almost all expensive pro mic preamps are actually sound processors tailored for a certain "musical" sound, and mixing engineers chose them individually for specific tasks. His recommendation was to just get the RME mic preamp and be done with it. I didn't though because the smallest (QuadMic) had 4 channels and did cost some €600. I got the UMIK-1 instead.The funny thing to me is a lot of the "holy grail" mic pres aren't exactly super-low distortion (be it THD or otherwise) - they probably were SOTA at the time of design, but they're almost all 50ish years old. Transformer coupled inputs and outputs, plus discrete transistors (or even tubes, for slightly earlier ones) were standard tech.
Classic Neves, for example, have very obvious transient smear from the coupling transformers, which you can see if you run a step response through them - or just listen to what they do to a snare drum vs a cleaner, faster response mic preamp. (say, some modern IC transformerless design). The transient gets rounded off a ltitle bit. But, looking at the circuit, it uses a fair bit of local NFB - so if that shyster at PS audio thinks he's somehow a better designer than Rupert Effing Neve...
Yeah, despite saying otherwise, they are crazy.
SoundOnSound magazine had a blind listening comparison of microphone pre's a few years back. I forget something like 9 different ones ranging in price from $300 to $10k. A few dozen responses from people in their forum. There was no consensus on the best. They weren't quite evenly split. #1 choice by a slim margin was the ART tube pre for that $300. The next was moderately expensive and the next one also cheap.
Pre-amp circuitry is mostly bound by the physics of noise, gain and bandwidth. There are a few ways to get near the physical limits at low distortion, high enough output and more than 100khz bandwidth. There are some pretty good circuits with only 4 jfets in them.
I'd imagine whatever they come up with won't match an Earthworks ZDT microphone pre. But it might cost as much or more.
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