pro tools op

Digidesign PRE

Possibly one of the most underrated and undervalued multi mic pre box on the market.

I don’t really know why Digidesign doesn’t promote these more heavily. Perhaps their margins are lower on this, or the competition in the marketplace just doesn’t make it worth the effort for them, but these are some really great mic pres.

The Upside

It’s 8 mic pres in two rack spaces. It is remote controllable from within the Pro Tools session window and via MIDI. It has multiple outputs. It has the usual nice mic preamp features like variable impedance, High pass filter, phase reverse and a -20db pad. It also has some features not found on many mic pres, like a selectable insert and ¼” input jacks on every single channel as well as two additional ones on the front. It also has a 1k oscillator which is incredibly useful when troubleshooting a system. On top of all this, it sounds pretty good. It’s pretty quiet and is very transparent. It has well extended lows and highs and it compares favorably with other mic pres that cost twice as much per channel (most notably the grace 101, which I used to own)

On the hidden value side, the insert sends doubles as a secondary TRS output. It’s always sending signal even with the insert button turned off and therefore makes it secondary output for live recording. Send the D-Sub output to your HD rig, send the TRS send to another recorder (we use an Alesis HD24, which makes TRS-TRS cable snakes cheap and easy to use) and you have a very reliable line level analot mult to your backup.

The best part of it is that you can find them on the used market ranging in price from 1800 to 1200 dollars a box. That comes out to 150-220 a channel for a pretty damn good sounding mic pre.

The Downside
It clicks when you turn the gain knob. It doesn’t have a trim for the gain. There is only one knob (the gain) and you have to select the channel before turning the knob to get any sort of adjustments done unless you’re working via remote control. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which channel you’re working on and what the settings are. I would be very very cautious about plugging in a ribbon mic to this box. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever done so, although it does have 60 db of gain, so it should be able to handle a ribbon mic pretty well in terms of gain.

But on the whole I think this is a really respectable mic pre. And it is an incredible value for the money.