yates75, what Jon Stoppable says is close to what I've been trying to say here for some time:
- Pro audio equipment is designed to work with other pro equipment. Consumer audio equipment is designed to work with other consumer equipment. There are established standards in each realm, but no standard for combining them; they have conflicting requirements.
- Any solution that you find for one particular combination of pro and consumer equipment may differ from (and can sometimes even be the exact opposite of) what you'd need to do for other combinations of pro and consumer equipment.
If you divide the "signal chain" into (a) microphones, (b) mike cables, (c) mike powering, (d) mike preamp and (e) recorder, you are trying to go from balanced to unbalanced between points (c) and (d). That can be done on a case by case basis, but the solutions are more general (i.e. your solution in one case is more likely to apply to other cases as well) if you make the transition between (d) and (e) instead. And that way the powering can be built in to the preamp, which gives you one fewer box and less cabling to deal with.
Phantom powering is a standard defined for balanced, professional microphones that are connected via balanced cables to balanced inputs. There are several possible, mutually incompatible ways of adapting the output from a phantom power supply and feeding unbalanced inputs with it. In your situation you have to choose one, but the penalty for choosing the wrong one may include damage to the microphones, the phantom power supply, and/or the recorder. Those are extreme cases, but they can definitely occur. More often the combination of equipment either doesn't work, or it works poorly, e.g. from a signal-to-noise standpoint. That's why I don't recommend making the transition from balanced to unbalanced at that point in the "chain." It can be worked out case by case but can be very problematic in general.
When Jon talks about providing transformers at the inputs of a preamp or other piece of audio circuitry, that would make the inputs of the circuitry balanced—and of the available solutions, it's the approach that comes closest to working in all cases if it's done well. However, good audio transformers aren't cheap, so a lot of people try to avoid using them to save the bucks. Also, in some cases they truly aren't necessary, so as long as you have equipment that doesn't need them and you never ever ever change microphones or the recorder, there's no reason to use them. But if you're going to use different models of microphones and different recorders, then they can take most of the worry out of the equation.
--best regards