I've been trying to figure out the differences between the USBPre2 and MixPre-D. It seems the USBPre2 can pretty much do everything the MixPre-D can but is cheaper. What am I missing?
I've been looking at both of these units on and off for a while and here's a quick list of things the USBPre2 doesn't have: tone generator for calibration/slate mic, sunlight viewable/adjustable meter brightness, external & internal powering, balanced input transformers, mid-side matrix control, AES digital output, 12 V phantom power, left-center-right panning, clean headphone amp, return signal confidence monitoring while in standalone mode.
I'm curious about the headphone amp thing...
I haven't had a chance to try my "version 2" USBPre yet, but when I had the v1.5, the headphone amp was one of the things I really liked about it. Sounded very clean to me & had plenty of power to drive my 600-ohm AKG K240DF's.
I can't imagine they would have downgraded the headphone output in the new one. Did they??
The specs look pretty good on it:
THD+N (22 Hz - 22 kHz measurement bandwidth)
0.05% max (HEADPHONES output, 2 V rms output, 600 ohm load)
Oh... not sure if it's been mentioned, but another thing the MixPre-D has that the USBPre-2 doesn't:
"Dedicated mic-level output on locking TA3 connector for unbalanced camera inputs"
(primarily for video on DSLRs, from what I understand)