[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 1/21/2015 10:19 PM, Jason wrote:

This may be a silly question - squelch it if so, but what makes "good"
preamps so expensive? I presume all the designers know of the good parts
to use and of good designs (wrong?) but beyond that what accounts for the
price? ..better design? good testing? careful component matching? j

Mostly it's the last little bit of performance in one or a few different
ways that people who want something different. Part of the reason why we
have so many expensive mic preamps is that 20 years ago there were a lot
of mediocre preamps because that was all they could do for the price
that would allow them to sell a whole lot of them.



If you wanted good preamps, you bought a whole console. There've
probably always been bespoke preamps but it really picked up
in the '90s, when people started being unhappy with DAW preamps.

Today, you can make a very serviceable preamp for $25 worth of parts.
Putting it in a box with a power supply, connectors, switches, etc. can
add another $100, add in marketing and profit and $200 per channel will
get 95% or more users a good recording, all other things being equal.
The other 5% are willing to pay 5-10 times that for a special color,
another 10 dB of gain without noise, and bragging rights.

If you look inside a Gordon preamp, you'll easily see why it's worth
$2500. If you look inside your heart, you'll wonder if you'd get more
bang for your bucks with something else. Some will, some won't.



I've done mixes from studios with good preamps, and I've done mixes
using my own modest prosumer preamps ( say, Symmetrix quality ) and
in neither case was it clear the preamps were the bottleneck.

But I'm not exactly recording finely crafted acoustic instruments
with expensive mics.

--
Les Cargill