thanks for your help jon.
i finally got over my phantom fears and they worked fine with the littlebox, no problems. i had it up on full gain and it sounded quite good.
a/b'ed against a dav bg1 and there is almost no difference. maybe a little more bass in the littlebox (from the input transformers?)
there is some hiss from both preamps, not sure if this is room noise or mic noise. it's audible but by no means loud, though it's louder than the dpa 4060's. haven't seen any published noise specs for the m160's
i was surprised how similar they sounded. i was sort of hoping one would outperform the other and it would be easy to then make a decision to get rid of the lesser.