A newbie question, any advice much appreciated, I am experimenting with trying to get the lowest noise floor out of the DR-100 MKII while recording regular-volume film dialogue in a room. My latest attempt is to run a Rode NTG-2 mic into a Behringer mixer, and go line-level into the Tascam. With the Behringer cranked to max gain, +60, and the Tascam gain wheel at the middle, +5, the dialogue peaks at about -14, and the noise floor is pretty good, down around -51, which is better than if I run the Rode mic directly into the Tascam's preamp on mic level. In that signal path, with the Tascam gain cranked to max, +10, the noise floor is around -40. I would like the dialogue level to be slightly louder, but pushing the Tascam gain wheel to +7 gives me a little more noise than I would like.
Am I doing this right? Is there some magic "unity gain" where the Tascam does not add noise and all the preamp gain is being done by the mixer? Would +5 on the Tascam gain wheel be near this magic point? Do you just use your ears to find the best combination of gain on the mixer and gain on the Tascam? Or is there some kind of "standard" way that you should do the gain staging?
And let's say I subbed a first generation Sound Devices MixPre for the Behringer mixer, (unfortunately, this is not a test I can afford to do), would the noise floor be even lower, on the theory that you get what you pay for?