Very, very nice.
its great to see folks like yourself discover us,...and find excitement w/the target market.
bravo!
I'd throw down w/a set of features that I'd like...but you've got everything covered basically.
Now, here are the marketing aspects of our community. perhaps these points will dictate/drive functionality of said preamp.
as for a name, I say keep it what you have. maybe throw a "FV field version" in there.
- we strive for sound quality. we like our preamps to be quick and clean. no noise. no commissions. Not to say we dont like our "flavor" too, but there are many preamps out there w/that.
- we like "in the bag friendly". recessed controls, side accessable cables, exteranal DC power that is easy to run off of Lithium Ion products (like DVD batteries for those portable players) that output 9-12v.
- 4 channel recording is a hot ticket right now. lots of people doing it, or wanting to.
- "dongle" cables to cut down on space. Instead of various I/Os and the room that the jacks require, think about a single 5pin output, either w/switchcraft mini's (ta5) or full sized 5pin XLRs. then you have various breakout cables which you can market or leave to the cable makers (we have several wonderful companies here on the list making custom cables). This way you can have balanced/unbalanced and any flavor of output from the preamp to recorder.
- as mentioned...lights are not all that relevant. one to show its "on". one to show that its "going to die" and one to show that its clipping, or close to it. Many people like to run their gear "hot". so a light at -2db would be perfect. Lets us know what the box is doing before sending a signal out to a recording deck.
- small, light, easily concealable.
- cost effective. put the investment into the internal parts and dont sweat the exterior.
Now, if you really want to get fancy and have a product that no-body else offers:
Many (and I mean many) people here run modular microphones with "active" cables. Think schoeps collette, Neumann KM100 series..etc.
build a preamp that can eliminate the need for the preamp body of these modular systems.
Something lemo style connectors for the Schoeps active cables and Neumann ka style older active cables.
There are only two boxes like this in existence.
1. the schoeps VMS (which will only work w/the schoeps mics, of course)
2. Sonosax "lemosax" version, no longer in production. This would take the schoeps and the neumanns, I believe.
We also have new modular kits w/active cable solutions in the pipeline from:
- Beyerdynamic
- VMlabs
- Peluso (cemc6 condensers)
and, the wish of all wishes..., build an active cable for the AKG c6x series caps that will work w/the c480 body *(or no body at all).
it doesn't exist (for all intents). one fella used to build them, but no longer.