Good first studio preamps on a (tight) budget

[saulpickett]

Setting aside for the moment any question of veracity as it relates to that post, I will now and forevermore blame a transformerless preamp whenever I sing out of tune.

you would be suprised. obviously you don't know what you're talking about or doing if you literally sing into transformerless pres. probably you don't realize your recording mechanism is playing back at a different speed and pitch than while you are recording. do you have a varispeed clock setup etc probably not this issue exists even with tape machines. why do I even try you people aren't worth me explaining it to you. deafies . yall some deaf people thats cute deaf people on an audio forum who aren't even musicians they just play on their midas X32's all day and tell everyone they have a midas. thats great. oh. one thing you can do to improve your digital recordings is use one of those multitrack digital things with the faders and the little boss type 9v power . you know those zoom or tascam or korg or fostex or whatever digital portastudio. and run it on a 45W light bulb like a guitar amp limiter helps even out the reconstructed pitches and tempos. problem is none of those things have varispeed I guess yall are all lost causes.

no, no . it only took me my whole life to figure this stuff out. forget about it. hayes and horowitz is the extent of electrical knowledge. everyone move along nothing to see here back to your mullard handbooks and electronics bibles....

thats also the main issue with vintage transformers. thats why you need a variable pad like the H pad before a sta-level or something or the output control on the EMI 436 compressor except on the input. so you can vary the input impedance and shake off the transformer resonance if it gets in the way of the performance.


edit 3. God you people are so dumb. sorry mods. please forgive me I'm trying to turn these pokemon into level 2 pokemon or whatever

no wonder all the music sucks these days and the gear is worse

 

[gyraf]

Much complaining, huh Saul?

You're tending to clutter up quite a few threads with pointless tl:dr rants..



/Jakob E.

 

[Newmarket]

If I was going to buy an SSL fusion or neve MBT the first thing I would do is rip out the power supply and rip out all the LED's . but you guys know better than me: I"m just a stupid louisiana crackhead so F-it.

Who's going to break it to him that those things won't work if you "rip out the power supply" ???

 

[amplexus]

I’ll just leave this here.

 

[DFischer]

It's not always easy to get a sense of who you are arguing with on a forum. Before things get any uglier, I'd suggest checking out Saul's YouTube channel. He's clearly coming at things with a different approach than most of us here. There's probably not a lot of overlap, so there's no reason to go dark with this.

 

[JMan]

If Saul is not a bot and is in fact a real person, I don't want to make his life harder, even if it does seem like he's just trying to bait us. And since he did say in the midst of one of those essays that we're making fun of him, I at least wanted to say that when I posted this...

Setting aside for the moment any question of veracity as it relates to that post, I will now and forevermore blame a transformerless preamp whenever I sing out of tune. (Err, that is, when the differentially balanced electronic input forces me to sing out of tune against my will).

...I wasn't trying to make fun of him, I was making fun of my singing. I don't need justonically resonating fixed-key harmonic distortion from my garbage transformerless preamp to sing out of tune, thank you very much, I can do that all on my own! Just ask my fans neighbors.

 

[Rowboat]

Hey I'm just popping back in here to say this: regarding this exact statement and philosophy.... its a compelling one. The issue is in reality that transformerless, or "differentially balanced electronic inputs", and or any other electronically, directly-connected configuration is inherently worse, from a scientific performance perspective, as well as a musical one:


my primary issue with transformerless preamps is that they have a definite, inescapable tendency to resonate, distort, or otherwise alter the motion of the diaphragm in a correllated, harmonic manner, justonically. So regardless of the music, the input signal, the scale, this thing will ALWAYS be "resonating" in a locked justonic "key" which rears its head as the fifth of its resonance, complete with b3, M3, and b7 harmonics being the most obvious conflicts. This is very problematic for an auditioned performance, where the singer is constantly trying to adjust to this "microphone scale" which has no correllation to the intended result. How does this happen? Mostly?

Because the high impedance of the input approaches an open circuit to the microphone diaphragm (whether transformer output mic or direct to capsule...) and causes increased distortion, as well as percieved increased signal level. Imagine a microphone connected to nothing, and imagine a microphone shorted between pins 2+3. In the open circuit case, flyback, increased voltage, decreased current, and increased diaphragm nodes will exist much like hitting a drum and letting it ring. In the shorted condition, the "electrons" will "race around" and stop the diaphragm from resonating, or moving, much like a sail on a ship, dampened, like putting fabric over a snare drum. So from an electrical engineer's perspective, he will always prefer his microphones to be open circuit, because this generates the most voltage, which is the easiest possible charachteristic to measure with a DMM, and he will feel congratulated in himself for increased output on the only signal he ever microphones: a sine wave; which is also the easiest possible condition for any audio equipment to reproduce.

On the other hand, transformer inputs will resolve a lower voltage than differential electronic inputs: but will do so with percieved infinite current availability.... this is a huge, notable, non-overlookable electronic phenomenon, to be able to provide the perception of infinite current. I can't go into more details about this , but this is very important that I will glaze over.

EDIT 2:


wow I just wrote this huge dissertation on the whole thing about how transformers would improve the whole scenario. and literally on the last paragraph I hit some accidental button and it all got lost I hate my life. My suggestion to OP is to buy a bunch of transformers and buffer the inputs of the preamp with some SPST or DPDT switches to make or break the ground. truly guys my whole thing that I typed was truly brilliant and I lost it all I hate my life

Aww man, don't feel so awful! Still a great analysis.

 

[saulpickett]

call me dumb or whatever I cant post on forums cause literally everytime it goes like this and people just clash against my philosophy even when "im trying to blend in"

oh I forgot to mention the thing about taking all the led's and indicator lights out of the circuit but trust me that makes a difference. nothing sounds worse than a segmented LED meter bridge. cause every click of the thing turning on and off.... anyway. like people who take those old recievers and remove the incandescent VU meter bulbs and replace them with LED's dummies there goes your vintage sound out the window

edit : also. the shape of the case is the most important thing.....for sound. anyway. forget this noise who wants to play music??? does anyone even play music anymore or its just a weird loser hobby now

edit again: I guess my point is: there is a lot of opportunity in the world for things to be improved for small cost or simply with simple alternate configurations outside of convention. and like I dont have all the solutions but I'm just saying. when you take everything for granted, then youre just copying other people taking things for granted from people who actually made discoveries 50 years ago: and the audio industry is a perfect example of this because everything is just a clone of a clone of a clone of someone who actually designed something.... and on one hand I just want to say "yeah none of this matters its all just stupid music equipment that doesn't matter anyway." but on the other hand; this is all of electrical engineering. is just hooking things up the simplest way possible and claiming its finality or absolution. and when you start to look at greater industry, computing, power transmission, etc.... like. they're all doing the same exact thing and wasting how many millions in inefficiency all the time every day. so in a sense it does matter, I just believe audio can be a proving ground for greater optimization or electrical understanding. In a small scale sense that breakthroughs in audio could reach greater markets... but the audio industry itself thinks that innovation ended in 1970 so essentially there is no hope for the world I guess. like the Riot blockchain people. sure, the whole thing is a waste of energy from its needless existence. but also, their physical setup is one of the leakiest, noisiest, most inefficient configurations possible. simply by hooking their blockchain gizmos up properly they would probably save 20% of their energy idk. probably more actually. like the google "green facility." where their setup is literally a separate psu for every motherboard, rather than a couple giant DC supplies which feed banks of cards... I'm just saying. OP. dont go spend money on transformerless millenia preamps cause they're garbage physically manifested, like most of this new junk for sale.

 

[rock soderstrom]

call me dumb or whatever I cant post on forums cause literally everytime it goes like this and people just clash against my philosophy even when "im trying to blend in"

At first I thought you needed to work on your "blend in" skills but after watching your Youtube videos I think a tuner for your guitar is more important. Rock on Saul!

 

[JMan]

The cognitive dissonance created by holding the view of "you can't make anything of value if you have equipment that doesn't meet my impossibly narrow qualifications" and "forget this noise who wants to make music." Boy oh boy. But I will say this, Saul, and I mean it - you are clearly passionate and interested in pursuing high standards, and whether you believe it or not, that's something you have in common with many people here. You have a very poor grasp of how to talk to other people about it, but I applaud your dedication.

 

[SubSpec]

I'm just saying. OP. dont go spend money on transformerless millenia preamps cause they're garbage physically manifested

While I wouldn't go that far, I will say that after years of lusting after a Millenia HV-3 I was deeply disappointed when I recently acquired one. One channel works and one doesn't (or rather is noisy and has a few db less gain), but that can be fixed.

For the one that works though, I expected and hoped that this clean and fast pre would provide some tangible improvement over my True Precision 8 or Cranborne Camden (or onboard Antelope pres for that matter). To my ears and tastes it does not.

Further, when asking for some simple measurement points and values to aid in fixing the other channel I was told they don't provide schematics (which I didn't ask for) but they would be happy to take my $400 plus shipping to replace a few caps...

Anyway, this is no less tangential than anything else in this thread, but to the original point, there are some really good pres at a wide range of price points, and sometimes the more high-end and widely lauded options may not do it for you anyway.