Striving for clean transparent gain, I found a significant difference (to my ear) using good external preamps up through the era in which I was running a DR-680 and R-44 regularly. So I used a Grace V3 and had the R-44 Oade OCM mod'ed.. upon which happiness ensued. After that, the next hypothesis involved comparing a highest-quality stereo signal path (in my case primarily Microtech Gefell > V3) against a multichannel mic array using very good, but less costly mics and built-in preamps - essentially an equal cost trade. When I later moved on to a Zoom F8 I no longer heard a significant difference through its built-in preamps. That alone produced additional happiness. On the practical side alone, I was very happy to eliminate additional components and interconnects, but also felt I no longer needed to concern myself about compromising on the preamps. I do still sometimes wonder how using truly top-quality mics in place of the very good mics in my full mic arrays might compare, but that quickly exceeds my budget, would be less robust, and make the whole setup overly precious, so I don't think about that too much.
Clean preamp'n is easy these days.
Topic: Vintage vs Modern Mic Preamps (Read 5419 times)