Microphone Preamp
Microphone preamps are the second most important devices in your audio chain, after ADC/DACs. As I’ve already talked about in this chapter, I have an M-Audio MobilePre and a Focusrite Saffire Pro 26. With these I don’t need an internal computer sound card or separate preamp, because they have their own built-in microphone preamps. However, even if you prefer to use an internal sound card or have good external recording interfaces, you may still want to use a separate microphone preamp. Let’s talk about why the preamp is so important.
A preamp—short for preamplifier—amplifies a low-level signal to line level. The output from a microphone, a turntable, and many instrument pickups is lower than line level. Line level is a standard ...
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