"soundhaspriority"
wrote in message

Thanks to all. It looks like it's going to be the Apogee
Mini-Me.
The next question refers to allocating channels of
unequal quality. This is what the setup looks like:

Tascam FW-1082 firewire board,
http://www.tascam.com/Products/fw1082.html. It has four
onboard pres.

Four more channels are in the form of two Midiman DMP3's,

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/DMP3-main.html

The Tascam's SP/DIF will be fed by the Apogee Mini-Me.

This means that the channels will be of unequal quality.

However, other than the Apogees, its not clear what the ranking should be.

Also, mic preamp quality has an aspect of compatibility - some mic preamps
are better or worse choices depending on the mic used with them.


So, how to allocate them?

By ear, based on experience with how the mic pre works with a given mic.

In the case of a vocalist
backed by a band, it seems logical that the vocalist(s) should be on the
Mini-Me. In other situations, this is
less clear. Suppose I'm recording a chamber music
quintet, which might incorporate a variety of
instruments. I would want to use coincident stereo mic,
in combination with mics for the various instruments.

1. Is the distant coincident mic the most critical?

Depends heavily on the mics.

There are three major orthogonal dimensions of mic preamp quality - noise,
large signal performance and timbre.

The worst case for noise is distant mics when the mics are dynamics.

The worst case for large signal performance is a close-up condensor on a
loud instrument like brass or vocal.

Timbre relates to matching of the coloration of mic preamp with the mic and
the sound source.

2. Is there a clear ranking for criticality of the feed
for the following: sax, oboe, trumpet, violin, cello,
bass?

You forgot to tell us about the room, the position of the instruments the
music and the players. They are all relevant.

The problem here is a request for one-dimensional answer to a
multidimensional problem that, just to make things fun has major parameters
undefined.

It gets to be too much to handle except up front and personal.

At some point you just go out and try some stuff. One nice thing about my
home-site situation is that I get at least two rehearsals and one live
performance per week, with only limited pressure to have things optimized at
any given time. If I don't get it precisely right this week or this
rehearsal, there is always the next one.

The more serious pressure relates to major presentations, and I still get
three of those per year, each with two or more rehearsals.

Practice gets you closer to perfect more and faster than anything else.
There's got to be a balance between thinking and doing.