However, the Naiant littlebox has been compared with, and stood toe-to-toe with, a PSP and a Grace V3. Look elsewhere in the forums to find the results.
For clarity; that test was done using a version of littlebox that is not the general production version; different opamps.
By reason of deduction and without even doing a direct comparison, I'm pretty sure that the Naiant sounds quite alot better than the stock preamps in those products.
While I think AD chipsets have come close to par, I agree that there is still room to go in gain stages.
could it be some mics are not hot enough and some gain is still needed outside the recorder?
As I understood it, the original reason for a pre-amp was twofold;
1) I need X gain to get above the medium noise (cassette, reels, etc) and utilize headroom.
2) My internal gain was introducing more noise then an outboard pre-amp, thus I got cleaner signal by having an extra box.
Having low-output mics increases the dependancy on both, while having hot-output mics generally limits your technical concerns to the later.
having ran my 680 with my V3, Littlebox and straight into the stock internal mic preamps
I can honestly say that yes, there is definitely some improvement over the internals
for the price the Littlebox just can't be beat
I suspected as much.