Audacity Forum

<<<Koz have you tested any Art Tube MP? >>>

I have no experience with those.

I have a natural reluctance to use anything with a vacuum tube in it. Vacuum tubes bought me a great deal of food over the years and I think they're best left in their grave. I talked to a tube preamplifier user a while back and asked him how long he had been using his amplifier. He told me and I asked him about changing the tubes. He gave me The Blank Look. Tubes are very fancy light bulbs and they age, change characteristics, and burn out.

Did your tube amplifier stop working when you dropped it? Did you have to stop and sweep up the glass?

I did take a different tube pre apart once and I was surprised, but not shocked at what I found. They don't amplify anything with the tube. It's just there to create That Robust Tube Sound and that's it. All of the actual heavy lifting is modern solid state components.

But that's just me. A performer in the shop was using a 1947 Gates tube microphone amplifier for vocal work. He draped the house in black when it failed because I couldn't get it working again (output transformer failed -- inside the windings).

Koz

bgravato wrote:3 wires got disconnected while I was trying to pull i out...

Oops.

bgravato wrote:anyway nothing that my soldering iron can't fix...

Glad to hear that.

FWIW I've not used the Art Tube MP either but I have used other equipment by ART and have been pleased with it. Whilst not sonically the best on the market, the ART equipment that I've used has been as good or better than other equipment in the same price range and has been refreshingly well built. I'm not a big fan of tubes either, at least not for microphone pre-amps, though I know plenty of people that swear by them.

So 7 pages of posts later I went to read back the first posts... and (not surprisingly) I found out that now I'm considering the options I ruled out in the beginning because of the budget... The Art USB Dual Pre name just kicked in again and I'm convincing myself (well I guess I already knew this just was trying to fool myself into too optimistic beliefs) that you can't get good quality at a very low price...

So what began as a choice between which low budget usb mic to get has reached the point of which not-so-low-budget mic preamp interface should I get for my not-so-low-budget non-usb mic...

Koz already convinced me that I should get a PV6, only thing making me having second thoughts about it is this Art USB Dual Pre which has the advantage of being more portable (it's small, lighter and can run just from usb power and/or 9V batteries, but still having the option for external power supply).

Thinking out loud: maybe I should simply get both and then return the one I don't want to keep (which could get me in trouble if I don't want to return any )

I have a process whereby you can use the PV6 and the Macbook as a Digital Audio Workstation enough to sing (or perform) overdubbing and multi-layer recordings with no delay error. I use the Effects Send sound pathways in the PV6 in addition to the straight show channels to do this. I'm going to work this into a web page any minute now.

It's very difficult to get a preamp and computer to do that. So you might decide to keep both. The tube device for its sound (if you like it) and the PV6 for its mixing ability. The two are perfectly compatible with each other and the PV6 Tape-Out will plug directly into the MBP. They were intentionally designed to do that.

I understand you can get a PV6 with a USB service built in. I have no experience with that.

Koz

bgravato wrote:...
Thinking out loud: maybe I should simply get both and then return the one I don't want to keep (which could get me in trouble if I don't want to return any )

i ended up with two external interfaces that way
but the extra software was a big plus
and i *could* use one on the other pc i guess

whomper wrote:i ended up with two external interfaces that way
but the extra software was a big plus
and i *could* use one on the other pc i guess

Good thing about the Art USB Dual Pre is that it should work out-of-the-box without the need for any drivers or software... (just like the t-bone micplug does)

On other news... I've successfully reconnected the wires on the t.bone micplug and it's working again.

Meanwhile I'll try to find or build a simple 48V power supply for the phantom power and check how the mic will sound directly connected to my soundcard's line/mic input.

<<<line/mic input.>>>

We warn people about those English words. Stereo Line-In (blue) is very different from the mono Mic-In (pink). Very few sound cards have provision to switch between them allowing you to use one connection for both. The best sound cards that provide one connection have little "tick" sounds when they switch because they're using mechanical relays to do the work. We are talking about managing 0.002 volt analog signals with a noise floor a thousands times lower than that. I need to drop by Tesco later and pick up some more zeros.

Chances are if you have a PC laptop, you have a Mic-In and many of these high-level, stereo production tricks are closed to you. If you have a much larger deskside, you probably have both pink and blue.

Koz

kozikowski wrote:<<<line/mic input.>>>

We warn people about those English words. Stereo Line-In (blue) is very different from the mono Mic-In (pink). Very few sound cards have provision to switch between them allowing you to use one connection for both. The best sound cards that provide one connection have little "tick" sounds when they switch because they're using mechanical relays to do the work. We are talking about managing 0.002 volt analog signals with a noise floor a thousands times lower than that. I need to drop by Tesco later and pick up some more zeros.

Chances are if you have a PC laptop, you have a Mic-In and many of these high-level, stereo production tricks are closed to you. If you have a much larger deskside, you probably have both pink and blue.

Koz

I have a dedicated soundcard inside my PC, it has only one input for both line-in and mic-in, although inside it has two separated circuits for each, which are selected (from the software) by an internal relay

Edit: and the plug is a 1/4" (6.3mm) female jack and it isn't either blue or pink, it's black and gold

Quarter inch interface on a computer sound card (a real internal card) is most unusual.

Koz

From this review they state that:

The New Japan Radio NJM5532 and Texas Instruments R4850 op-amps are used for the line-in/microphone input. Asus chose to use miniature relays to do the switching between line-in and microphone modes. My theory is that the relays route the signal through the NJM5532s for the line-in, or the R4850s for the mic mode. The use of relays to switch the routing eliminates the signal loss that you would get if you used solid-state switching.

They also say that:

To the left of the AV100, you can see the Cirrus Logic CS5381 ADC used for the analog inputs. The DJ100 is apparently an AC'97 codec DAC (C-Media CMI9780), and therefore the microphone section of the AC'97 feature set is used as a pre-amp for the microphone (and front panel microphone). AC'97 is not synonymous with the highest quality, but as this soundcard is tailored toward high-end audio playback, it's not really an issue. You could always get a proper microphone pre-amp if you wanted to do some production-level recording from a microphone. The microphone input cannot be configured as balanced anyway.

Nonetheless I'd still like to give it a try...

Connecting the mic to a preamp and then the preamp to the line-in on the soundcard (selecting the input as line-in and not mic) is another setup that I'd like to try... I've tried to connect my Marantz CD Player to the line-in and it seems to be quite noise free... so if I connect a decent mic preamp with line output I'm hoping to get a good signal too...

My quest here would be mostly to find out which ADC would be better... the ADC in a mic preamp + usb output VS. soundcard ADC + a preamp with 1/4" line out