| Home recording and general music post from the archived Yabb Recording Website Message Board. Some of the info here may be outdated but many of the audio recording and home studio tips are still good. Note: The only tags I made and attempt to convert are italics, bold, center and underline. So if you see some gibberish surrounded by brackets, just ignore it.
Recording Website Archived Yabb board Post
Febuary 2001 Yabb Message Board Archive
Subject: Mic Pre's - Mackie vs. ???
by nickmix | 05/04/01 at 15:06:08
[color=Purple][/color] ???
I have a basic home DAW. I'm mainly guitar, bass and vocal based. I record it all in stereo using a Marshall condensor mic and a Shure 57. Right now I just use the mic pre's on a Mackie 1202 I bought new in 95. I'm considering getting a better dedicated mic pre like the Presonus Blue Tube or something. But I just ran across another thread that basically said the Mackie pres might be as good as I can get without spending $600. Any experiences/ insight on this question...?
Subject: Re: Mic Pre's - Mackie vs. ???
by ds | 05/04/01 at 16:20:24
My experience with the ones on the VLZ series is that they are just "okay". All hype aside, they're pretty clean sounding but there's something unappealing about the final result. I have a budget studio and I like to use the Paia tube preamp kit to add a little excitement to vocals.
Subject: Re: Mic Pre's - Mackie vs. ???
by Gary | 05/04/01 at 16:48:02
I think I would invest in a better mic first. Like a Shure ksm32 or something in that price range
first. I realy dont think going with the presonus is a step up from where you are at now.
:)
Subject: Re: Mic Pre's - Mackie vs. ???
by pcrecord | 05/04/01 at 20:55:52
Yes, I'd go for a better mic !!
A condenser mic with good quality may call for a better preamp, but a sm57 ?? Well, it's hard to get better even with the best preamp. So which one, you should choose ? Well, what do you want to record ?? Try the AKG C3000B, good for vocals and with some distance from the amp you can get good electric guitar and bass.(Get room for the bass frequencies to build) Close acoustic guit sounds good too. Not enough money ?? C1000s for vocals !
Anyway the only place I use sm57 is on snare drums and maybe toms if I can't find better.
Good luck !
Subject: Re: Mic Pre's - Mackie vs. ???
by Puke | 05/05/01 at 15:23:17
A lot of bad mouthing is going on with respect to the shure sm-57.
While in many situations it can be outdone by a more expensive mic. There are just as many that it cannot.
But as far as mic pre's go. You can rarely say a "so-so" one will not always be outdone by a much better one. There are very few (if any) instances that a mid-grade mic pre. will do just as well as a super one.
Should I say that one more time????
I don't know how so many people got the idea that a basic sm57 is sucky in most situations compared to a U87 or 414 or something.
It will usually not excel with vocals, but I believe the man who did the post mentioned guitar bass and vocals. (If he is talking about acoustic guitar and not amplified guitar, then I may be off base).
I have at my studio a 2" 24 tk tape that has 3 tracks of the same take recording electric guitar through a Hiwatt with early vox speakers. Of the 3 identical tracks, 2 are Neumann U 67 mics, and the other is an SM-57. To this day many years later you can still listen to it over and over and STILL not be sure there "IS" a difference, if any between the 3 tracks. And, also, if there is, is it good or
bad????. Now, the mic pre's for that were just the stock ones on a trident 80-b, which are not all that super, but I'm sure they are at least in a better ball-park than the mackie. So, my question would be,: would I be able to tell the difference if better mic-pre's had been used at the time???
I think not, but I may be wrong. YOU can start hearing a lot of stuff you didn't even know existed once you get into higher end pre's.
A super mic pre (with jensen x-formers and not circut balancing instead) will give you a warm lo-end you will NEVER get from ANY circut balanced gear. I don't think Shure uses circuts instead of transformers, to balance their mic outputs. But, to be honest, I may be wrong. It's been a long time since I've dismanted somthing like that for fun. later,