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Re: Popular preamps for use with SAC

PostPosted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 11:46 am
by newmediamark
jlepore wrote: We had done tests with the Octopre, profire, ada8000, and the native preamps in a SC48. The profire and octo's were just about identical with the 48 slightly better and the ada slightly worse.

The surprising thing was HOW close they were. It was really nitpicking to hear the differences.


It's difficult to evaluate a pre-amp channel or two until you put it through rigorous listening tests using many different input sources ... drums, vocals, acoustic instruments, etc. The differences you hear may be subtle, but in my experience, those subtle differences become quite obvious when you are running MANY channels simultaneously as you would in a real work application. It's about what the front end as a whole sounds like including the output bus electronics ... not just one channel.

Cheers,
Mark

Re: Popular preamps for use with SAC

PostPosted: Wed Jul 18, 2012 6:20 pm
by RBIngraham

Re: Popular preamps for use with SAC

PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 10:11 pm
by gdougherty
On a related note. I plugged my two new Profires into the 32 channel mix rack today and did a bit of testing to verify that everything was configured properly and routing as expected. The Profire requires a little work to get it to behave properly in standalone mode since by default it only does AD conversion and syncs to itself. Basically it's set to connect via the TRS outs to something with line level inputs. A few quick changes in software convert it to AD/DA for connection over ADAT, with sync to ADAT.

When I had TotalMix up, it handily shows the signal level coming into the interface channel via ADAT. A Profire with nothing connected to the input, and the gain all the way down, measures about -108db as a noise floor. From no gain to the 12 o'clock position is very clean gain, though I should also have passed a signal to see how much gain is actually applied. IIRC, it's about 20db of gain at that point. The noise floor went from -108 up to about -104-105. From 12 o'clock to the 3 o'clock position the noise floor went up to about -98db, still pretty good considering that's another 10-20db of gain as well.