gdougherty wrote:I think Richard has a few. I'm pretty sure he has a number of Presonus pres along with ADA's that could be compared.
I do have a lot of Presonus, but I never did a side by side of them, as I sold all my ADA8000s. I should have done a side by side while I had a few of each but never did, at least not on my SAC system. I mostly got rid of my behringer because of reliability. Too many times where I would power up and have to turn off and on to get rid of static on the ADA units. I never thought they sounded that bad frankly and I do miss the XLR outs, although I really like not having mic lines hanging out the front of my racks when using a D8.
I will admit that I am not a golden ear type. I just plug things in and use them. The only time I've ever done a side by side was when I had some presonus (FS units) and a single behringer (part of my old stock) hooked up to an LS9. To my ear I didn't really hear a difference between the Presonus and Behringer. Yes there was a difference, but I didn't find one to be better than the other. But they both sounded better than the internal preamps on the LS9 to me. This was on a system with d&b mains, so they are pretty good at exposing warts. The inputs were Lectrosonic wireless with Countryman E6 elemetns. So no companders. So I just tuned 3 seperate recievers to the same transmitter and ran them through the seperate preamps. I did switch them around just to make sure it wasn't a mic cable or reciever module that was influencing my ear, but it was also was in no way a blind test or the like. So placeebo could have in play I don't know. And it was also relatively brief. It's not like I spent all day tinkering with this. A quick, short experiment and then I moved on with life. Because as soon as you strap them on the real actors it probably doesn't matter any way.
I did this during the time I have assistants or crew wander around the stage talking to find where the feedback issues are going to be and while we are just making sure all the wireless work with no drop outs, intermod, etc, etc, etc....
I have not run into the hiss that Craig ran into and this same system with the d&b main rig, has several Digimax FS units both for inputs and outputs to the LS9. One of them is used as the D to A for all effects and monitor system outputs on the LS9 (the LS9 Omni Outs feed just the main house) and our system there is very quiet, no hiss. In fact to the point where you need to go stick an ear in a speaker to hear if it's turned on. Now keep in mind... we don't do rock!
I don't have amp gains just all cranked up! The sytem is balanced out to minimize all noise and give good signal to noise from input all the way to speaker.
But as I said I've never been one to get really fussy about the way a preamp sounds. Unless they really sound crappy I ussually don't even notice. I always thought the Mackie preamps (most of them I've run into anyway) sounded pretty good. The issues I've had with them over the years is that many of their mixers were terrible at rejecting EMI, picking up radio stations and all sorts of hash and crap in the area, which when you have 200' runs of snake to get to a stage in a theatre ussually spells disaster.
Anyway, sorry if my taste has led anyone astray.