Good Mic Preamps for upto £200 ish?

mrkb

Im considering adding a mic setup to my guitar rig, so am looking at mic preamps that have basic compression and Eq capability - ideally 1U rack sized. Mainly for live vocals but the odd bit of recording as well (I have a separate audio interface I can feed the preamp into for that).

I see ART did a few in the past and so did focusrite. Are the old ones on ebay surpassed by new technology or still worth considering - any old bargains to look for. Any new recommendations?

octatonic

You are looking for a channel strip, not a mic preamp.

£200 won't get you much, certainly not a step up from a decent built in interface preamp.

Nothing Focusrite did at the budget end is any better than their built in interface preamps.
But if you need something then check out a used Voicemaster Pro.
It is ok, has decent EQ- it doesn't blow me away.

Proper good quality channel strips really start at a grand.

Stuckfast

Maybe this?

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/studiomaster-vms

mrkb

Thanks for the advice. I need a non PC based mic interface, which I’ll then feed into Axe FX for reverb. so will check out channel strips a on eBay.

octatonic

Get this:
https://reverb.com/item/29151053-focusrite-platinum-voicemaster-pro-channel-strip

octatonic

or this:

https://reverb.com/item/29590525-focusrite-platinum-trakmaster-pro-channel-strip

mrkb

octatonic said:

Get this:
https://reverb.com/item/29151053-focusrite-platinum-voicemaster-pro-channel-strip

Thanks, that looks ideal and I was in Hatfield today. May need to pop back!

thegummy

mrkb said:

Thanks for the advice. I need a non PC based mic interface, which I’ll then feed into Axe FX for reverb. so will check out channel strips a on eBay.

Couldn't you use the Axe FX for compression and EQ as well so you'd only need a preamp rather than a channel strip?

mrkb

thegummy said:

mrkb said:

Thanks for the advice. I need a non PC based mic interface, which I’ll then feed into Axe FX for reverb. so will check out channel strips a on eBay.

Couldn't you use the Axe FX for compression and EQ as well so you'd only need a preamp rather than a channel strip?

That’s what I’m currently doing (mic into Mackie mixer, feed into AxeFX, then comp, eq, delay, reverb) and it sounds great, but it’s  using a lot of cpu in every patch, so I want to free up some fx blocks. Fractal reverb is superb, so seems sensible to offload compression and eq.