Ive built both the N72 and the JLm kit. The N72's are cool if you need a high gain 1272, you mentioned ribbon mics and acoustic guitars, which I would never use a neve anything on, but thats just my taste. If you've got thin tracks that need a lot of bottom, the N72 will serve you well, my issue with acoustics is always too much bottom and ribbons only complicate that, and in that case a 1272 based pre is definitely going to be working against you.
The jlm 99 pre is insanely good and versatile. You can put just about any transformer you want in there, bunches of people have heard the box I built at this point and *everyone* who has heard it has stopped in their tracks. The dual opamp pre that joe designed has a ton of gain and I used it to track vocals with a royer sf1 which is typically pretty picky about needing a good amount of clean gain. Depending on which transformers you elect to use, you can set it up to get you a wide variety of sounds and you can also use just about any opamp in there that has that standard 990 footprint. I think joes 99v opamp is really incredible though. If you go through the trouble of putting this kit together and you dont like the way it sounds, you could always go back and change the transformers and opamps with EASE and have a totally different sounding pre- its highly configurable, so doing the wiring for the boards allows you to make a few decisions about the exact sound you want down the line, you could put a handful of transformers in the input position, use anything you want more or less on the output and use a 1731, 2520, hardy 990, forssell 990 or the JLM 99v OR use a chip. Lots of options. With a 1:5 input, dual 99v's and a 1:1 output this thing puts out more gain than I need, I added a switch which keeps the second opamp at unity which is really useful I think...
dave
