The TRUTH About External Preamps: Are They Worth the Price?
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- Опубликовано: 3 июл 2024
- 🎧High-End Preamps: Luxury or Necessity?🤔
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Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:39 - What makes a preamp colored?
1:32 - The Test
2:39 - So...are they worth it? 
Видеоклипы
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Preamps make a difference that's neither good nor bad, just different depending on the topology of the circuit. Buying a preamp just because "it's better" is a bad reason if you don't know why it's better within the context it's being used in. There is almost zero reason to rush out and buy external preamps if your workload, workflow, and logistics don't depend on them. If you're brand new or you just don't know what the preamps are doing to the signal, buying one isn't going to help you. You have to know for yourself why you do or don't need one, otherwise you're playing a guessing game with your productions. There is no magical voodoo, meaning all audio is quantifiable and measurable allowing the user to have a solid understanding of what every piece of gear or plugin is doing in totality.
Between all of our tracking rooms I own at least 100 outboard preamps not including our console preamps, but I'm tracking huge sessions live off the floor. A preamp would be about the last thing I would tell a beginner or intermediate to buy even if their current goal is producing commercial quality tracks. Being great at writing, arranging, producing, tracking, and mixing is going to get you the commercial grade audio tracks, not a preamp.
Completely agree!
The song > Performance > Acoustics > everything else. But on the topic, a great preamp can help your average microphones greatly. But it's not something you should consider a bottleneck. It's just nice to have.
For sure! Although in my testing, I found the differences to be about the same with cheap and expensive mics. The only time I found a really big change with preamps was with using dynamic mics when the two preamps had significantly different impedances (or with ones that had selectable impedances). But that has nothing to do with preamp quality of course. But like you said, definitely not a bottleneck in any way!
I personally think your investment should depend on the majority of the work you’re doing in the studio. If it’s mostly mixing, I think your monitoring and room treatment should be priority one. If it’s tracking, I think good mics (not necessarily expensive) along with recording space treatment should be priority one because it’s the very first thing with which the sound interacts. If you do both, I think I might still lean towards monitoring…
100% agree with this! The only thing I'd add is if you're tracking, good sounding (again, not necessarily expensive) instruments should be up there (obviously depending on what you record. If you only record vocals, no need for this!).
@@BetterMixes oh yeah! That’s an excellent point. The sound source itself is really tge MOST important regarding tracking.
@@LBJedi Totally! 🤘🤘🤘
These things certainly make a difference and add up. It makes sense to invest in it if you’re making money. But for a lower middle class self recording artist, it’s a trap. I’d driven myself broke and mad multiple times until I realized my energy was best spent making music rather than reading the soap opera that is the forum formerly known as Gearslutz 😂 All about perspective and context I guess.
Haha yeah, I stopped paying much attention to Gearslutz after realizing I was reading a ton of advice on there from someone I knew in real life...someone who had absolutely NO idea what they were talking about 😆
But yeah, like you said, they totally make a difference, and for some people, there will come a time when it 100% makes sense to make that investment. I'm just trying to show people which things make a massive impact and which make a tiny impact so they don't blow thousands on preamps, expecting massive changes when there might be other things they could invest in that would ACTUALLY make a night and day difference.
I've never been a Gearslutz user nor have I ever spent time reading the forums up until a couple weeks ago when a friend asked me to take a look at a thread. I was shocked at how bad the information actually was, and a lot of it was written by self proclaimed professionals (one person being a newer RUclipsr who has almost no musical ability.) After that I picked a few more threads at random to see if they were better, but they were just as bad if not worse than the first thread. It seems like the majority of the users are glorified gear collectors rather than any sage type of characters whose advice I would heed. They definitely knows gear specs and the cost, but that's meaningless on it's own in relationship to producing music (hobbyist or professional.)
I'm not trying to be a downer or hate on a forum because it's popular thing to do, nor am I trying to throw shade on any real life people. I just saw comments so bad that they were the opposite of advice. These people were getting so uptight and angry on subjects as simple as This Clone vs That Clone while having every justification in the world to support their anger, but none of them created anything meaningful with either of the clones. I think the forum is not only a waste of time but a detriment to success.
So true! Time is much better spent actually making music!
@@legacyShredder1you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately 10 years ago when I got on the forum to seek helpful guidance, I didn’t know enough to know just how bad most of the info was. Cost me a lot of money when simply playing and recording would’ve served me 10x better.
@@BetterMixesand you did a great job at demonstrating this. Some will find it worth the investment and some won’t. The more videos like this, the better. It gives perspective rather than pure marketing. Thank you 🙏🏻
IMO not worth it. The sound difference was obvious but neither was "better" and realistically it could have been accomplished in much cheaper ways to what is probably about 80% there.
Exactly. Like if you use a colored compressor or EQ or a saturation plugin...boom. Obviously it would be a different flavor of color, but still.