Justin Ulysses Morse wrote:
I guess we both do, don't we? You assume that everybody's goal is to
make a recording that's exactly the same as what happened in the
studio.

I never record in a studio.


I assume that somebody who's concerned with purity as much as you are
would take steps to optimize noise performance of a microphone
preamplifier by feeding a gain stage with something close to its ideal
source impedance. Plugging a low-impedance microphone into a tube
stage with essentially infinite impedance is less than ideal from a
noise perspective, and simultaneously throws away all the free gain you
get from a transformer.

What is this "free gain"? Noise gets stepped up along with the signal.

Minimizing noise may not be the right choice, if it forces
less-than-optimal sound quality. If a tube preamp without transformers
can record solo classical guitars with ribbons from six feet quietly
enough, and if those preamps sound superb because of having no
transformers, I think the tradeoff they embody makes sense, even though
they may not be the quietest possible.

James Boyk