On 2017-06-26, John Leonard wrote:
Well, of course, the ULN-8 isn’t just a pre-amp: it happens to have eight very nice low-noise high-gain mic pre-amps as part of the package, that’s all.
Nowadays even the highest of the highest spheres in operational amplifier technology costs something like 40 bucks per stereo pair. So, with the minimum of high grade passive components included, and adding a competitive markup, plus upholstery, it's unlikely you should have to pay much in excess of 150 euros for your mic preamp. At that price point, it already ought to look good as well as sounding nice.
What I mean to say here is that far too many people price themselves out of the game. Analogue preamp engineering is not exactly the kind of rocket surgery which calls for thousands of bucks at a pop. Done right, using current top of the line components, it certainly makes its demands known to your wallet. But when done right, it won't blow the bank.
Compared to the much more stringent and esoteric demands placed on a well-designed spatial pickup feeding your preamp, the latter ought to be a mere financial byline.
Empirically, based on my own experiences, the two low-cost (sub-$1,000.00) multitrack portable recorders that I tried after initially purchasing the Tetramic, were noisy at high gain when attempting to record quieter sounds with the Tetramic.
Then, regurgitating Fons's words, something is very wrong there. Using current chips and just a hint of age old analog engineering knowhow e.g. in how to make up a proper gain structure, you can *easily* get into stable 18 bit territory for less than a hundred bucks, per four channels. Getting past 20, predictably, start to run into diminishing returns, true. But then pretty much nobody both has the mic to exercise such extreme sensitivity, *while* at the same time running such a forbidding absolute amplitude reference as to not be able to gain ride any residual noise below the audibility threshold. Pretty much the only folks with such stringent demands come from a film sound background, with enough bucks from the get go to render the whole point moot.
I found that this was not the case with the ULN-8 and also with the Sound Devices 788T. We shall see how the SD Mix-Pre 6 behaves when it eventually reaches these shores.
To reiterate, if you can hear any difference between such already rather high end devices, somebody, somewhere royally fucked up. Even if my understanding of analogue engineering is rather limited, still, given the almost unreal performance of today's opamps as a building block, even I am fully confident I could design a minimalistic, well-performing mic preamp from scratch.
As always, other people may have different experiences, but their needs may not be the same as mine.
Granted, that. However, I'd still like to challenge you, as a practitioner, a wee bit. What *are* your needs, really? How do you quantify them, precisely?
I mean, once we know what you and the other practitioners are *really* after, I'd contend that even a half-baked theoretician such as myself could readily give rise to some rather magical sounding things. The kind of bang for buck which is entirely two or three decades beyond what an audiophile purveyor would have you believe is possible.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
