Members MrJoshua Posted November 15, 2008 Members Share Posted November 15, 2008 I have a "The Brick" preamp already, and like it a lot. Has anyone used a SuPre? What did you think? Thoughts? Impressions? What did you like? What did you dislike? Talk to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted November 15, 2008 Share Posted November 15, 2008 I tried one out for a couple of months. It's actually very nice - somewhere between the Brick and the Vipre in both features and sound. Like the Brick, it's built like a tank, and (keep this to yourself), considering the build quality, features and sound, and the fact that it's a two channel preamp, they probably should charge twice what they're asking for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members veracohr Posted November 15, 2008 Members Share Posted November 15, 2008 I tried one out for a couple of months. It's actually very nice - somewhere between the Brick and the Vipre in both features and sound. Since I've used none of the three, how would you describe the range of sound between the Brick and the Vipre? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted November 16, 2008 Author Members Share Posted November 16, 2008 I tried one out for a couple of months. It's actually very nice - somewhere between the Brick and the Vipre in both features and sound. Like the Brick, it's built like a tank, and (keep this to yourself), considering the build quality, features and sound, and the fact that it's a two channel preamp, they probably should charge twice what they're asking for it. Sounds good to me. I have a $100 gift certificate at Sweetwater, so I think I just may order myself a SuPre. I mean, yeah, I'll still have to pay the other $1500, but hey, that's still $100 off... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted November 21, 2008 Author Members Share Posted November 21, 2008 Alright, the SuPre arrived yesterday, so I thought I'd share my first impressions. I've only had the chance to use it on vocals and electric guitar - I'll do a more in-depth review after I've had a few weeks (or months) to get more used to it. On taking this thing out of the box, it looks VERY impressive. My guitarist asked if I stole it out of an old Russian submarine. Lots of switches, fancy light-up VU meters - it has a very old-school vibe that I like. It's a heavy unit. While it's advertised as a 3U device, its weight and depth requires a bracket (which ships with the unit) to be attached about halfway back to provide extra support. This bracket extends forward and up to the rack space directly above the unit, so it's actually a 4U device in the rack when everything is said and done. While it's possible that some things could be placed on top of the SuPre in the 1U space left by the bracket, I'd be very cautious as there are vent holes only a few inches back and I certainly wouldn't recommend blocking them! I wish they had avertised this as a 4U device, though, as I would have made sure to have 4U available when it arrived instead of just three rack spaces - I had to move three patch bays higher up in the rack to make space for it. That's not a really big deal, though. The preamp arrived about half an hour before a session was scheduled to start, so I went ahead and racked it up, then got it connected to the patchbays. The other guys started showing up just as I was finishing up the patching. The first use of the preamp was on electric guitar. We brought in a very solid blues/rock player to put down some guitar on a track for us. He was playing a goldtop Les Paul through my Orange Tiny Terror amp into a 2x12 cab. The volume was fairly low and the sound was very clean, with just enough bite to cut a bit. I put a Cascade Fathead II ribbon mic (with Lundahl transformer) about four inches in front of one speaker, right at the edge of the dustcap and pointed slightly off-axis toward the cone, and connected this to the SuPre. The SuPre then fed one channel of an Apogee Rosetta 200 converter into ProTools LE. Nice. Very nice. The combination of the ribbon mic and the preamp did a good job of capturing the sound from the amp in a very natural way. While it may have smoothed the highs a tad, I didn't feel that it gave too much color to the sound. I'm looking forward to trying this combination again in the near future, though, as I still have a lot of exploring to do in order to find all the ways to use this preamp (lots of switches, remember, including a variable input impedance). After the guitar was done, we brought in a female singer whose voice I really like - she has a nice mellow sound with a full body to it, and great projection. I put a Microtech Gefell MT-71S (I think that's the right number - the cardioid-only version) in front of her and ran it into the second channel of the preamp, then to the Apogee Rosetta 200 again into ProTools LE. At this point I left the room and let Jeff, one of the other guys working on the project, take over. Why? Because he's much better friends with that particular singer, we were working in a very small (10'x10') room that gets crowded easily, and I wanted her to be in a very comfortable environment so she could get the best possible takes down. So I went and hung out with Bob, the other guy working on this project, in the living room while we waited for them to track vocals. After a while, though, we wound up back in the studio as Jeff was having trouble with a little distortion on the vocal takes. What had happened was this. We normally watch the meter on the Apogee to make sure it isn't being driven into clipping, set our preamp levels accordingly, and hit record. The problem is, the SuPre seems to start clipping well before reaching that volume level, and Jeff simply didn't notice it at first what with all the other stuff going on. It wasn't a lot of distortion - it just sounded like there was some harmonic distortion going on in the upper registers, if that makes any sense (I hate trying to describe a sound with text). I sort of liked it, as it made her voice sound very thick, but Jeff didn't like it at all. Now, this is a case of me needing to get more familiar with the pre, because I noticed that the input impedance switch was on its highest value. But I didn't want to start flipping switches on the preamp right at that moment, so instead I backed down the gain on the SuPre and routed the signal through the line input on the Toft AFC-2 and sent it through the EQ. I didn't do any EQing, just used it to makeup some nice clean gain before sending the signal on through to the Apogee. This allowed us to capture a clean sound on the recording. So, my first impression is that I love the sound of the preamp, but I'm not sure exactly how much headroom I have yet. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for overdriving a preamp when it gets me the sound I want, but I need to know how my meters are calibrated so I have something to give me an indicator when my ears are dead after a long session. I'll spend more time using the SuPre over the next several weeks and post a full review then, but so far I like it. As an aside, I wouldn't have used it on this session without trying it out myself first, except this is a project I'm working on with friends. It isn't a paying gig, in other words - just me and some buddies making music. So I knew that if something went wrong, they'd laugh at me and we'd move on. There you go. More to come later! 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Phil O'Keefe Posted November 21, 2008 Share Posted November 21, 2008 Yes, you can get a SuPRE to break up - that's part of the fun of it. It does have a good deal of gain and headroom though, so no worries about having enough level from it - you're just going to have to spend a bit of time with it until you get it all sussed out and find the best settings for a particular application. And if for some wacky reason you DON'T have enough gain for that ribbon mike you have placed 10' away from the fingerpicking acoustic guitarist, you can cascade channel one into channel two. Because the SuPRE is so darn quiet, you can actually do so without the noise levels getting out of hand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted November 21, 2008 Members Share Posted November 21, 2008 Thanks for your impressions of the mic pre! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted November 22, 2008 Author Members Share Posted November 22, 2008 Yes, you can get a SuPRE to break up - that's part of the fun of it. It does have a good deal of gain and headroom though, so no worries about having enough level from it - you're just going to have to spend a bit of time with it until you get it all sussed out and find the best settings for a particular application. And if for some wacky reason you DON'T have enough gain for that ribbon mike you have placed 10' away from the fingerpicking acoustic guitarist, you can cascade channel one into channel two. Because the SuPRE is so darn quiet, you can actually do so without the noise levels getting out of hand. Well, in this case it was a LDC mic placed about six inches in front of a loud singer, but I know what you mean. Last night I used the SuPre on drum overheads, with a pair of AKG C430 SDCs. I tried to set it where it would break up just a little on the louder sections of the song, and I feel like it gave a little extra thickness to the drum sound. (The C430 is a decent overhead mic, as it has a built-in treble boost that usually sounds good on cymbals, but unfortunately that boost renders it borderline useless for any other application, IMO.) I then used it on an electric guitar cab again, using the same Fathead II w/ Lundahl transformer ribbon mic. Turning the pre up until just before the meter peaked sounded good, but the output of the preamp wasn't enough to even get the Rosetta's input meter halfway up (edit: I don't try to track with extremely hot signals, but I usually like to get the Rosetta's input between halfway and two-thirds on the hotter parts of a song). I routed the preamp output through the Toft AFC-2 again and used it for an extra gain stage, and it sounded great, but I really shouldn't have to do that, should I? I feel like I'm probably missing something fairly obvious, and it's possible that I should have just kept turning the preamp up and listening for any sign of overdrive, but I was on a fairly tight time budget last night trying to help a buddy record some songs to give his wife a CD for her birthday so I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time experimenting. Tonight I'll be getting together with the same guy working on vocals and some acoustic guitar tracks to finish off the CD, and I'll spend some more time working with the pre to figure out how hard I can push it before it breaks up, along with starting to experiment with it to find out when and how to use the overdriven sound to fill out different parts. So far, though, I'm thinking that this fills a niche that was left vacant by my other preamps. My only other tube pre is the Brick, and it doesn't usually break up very well, if at all (and by the time it does, I need something pulling down the signal after it because it's thrashing my converters well into clipping). I have colored preamps like the API and Great River, and I have clean preamps like the RNP and Grace Designs. But I haven't had anything that I could use to add some saturation onto a sound, or keep a little lower and get a nice clean sound while adding a little makeup gain later in the chain. I'll keep adding to this over the next couple of weeks as I use the preamp more and get more used to it. I'm looking forward to trying out the instrument inputs as a bass DI, as well as experimenting with the various input impedances to see how the impact the sound. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted November 23, 2008 Author Members Share Posted November 23, 2008 OK, last night I used the SuPre to record acoustic guitar and vocals. I placed an AKG C-414 B/XLS in cardioid mode, then put it in X/Y with a Microtech Gefell MT-71S (cardioid-only) with the Gefell pointed toward the body of the guitar and the 414 pointed toward the headstock, roughly. It was an X/Y - you know what I'm talking about. Each mic was run into one channel of the SuPre. Because I wanted to avoid saturating the tubes, I set the levels so that playing hard on the guitar would not quite red-line the VU meters on the SuPre. Now, the manual states that 0VU (the beginning of the red area) on the meters should be +4dBU from the SuPre, which should be plenty of signal (more than I normally want, in fact) to my Rosetta 200 converters. However, I must be missing something, because when the meters are in the red I'm still only getting a moderately weak signal into the Rosetta and that's with the tubes in the SuPre driven into clipping. While that sounds good, it isn't the sound I was going for here. So, I left the levels fairly low in the SuPre and then ran it into the line inputs on my Toft AFC-2. The preamps on the Toft are pretty mediocre, but the EQ is stellar, and there's a decent amount of clean gain available through the line inputs. Well, the combination sounded fantastic. The guitar came through very natural and clean, with a clear sound that made me feel like I was sitting in the room listening to the guy play. Then I left the same setup in place and had him sing the vocals while sitting in the same spot, with the guitar on his lap. The end result was a track that sounds like a guy sitting down and playing and singing a song - just what I was looking for, in other words, with a warm, natural sound. So far I'm liking this preamp a great deal. There are still plenty of things I need to figure out about it, and I'm still a little suspicious of the gain staging and suspect I have something set up incorrectly somewhere, but all in all it's a great preamp for a very reasonable price. The more I use it, the more I like it. And hey, it has my rack just about filled up! So it has that going for it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MrJoshua Posted November 23, 2008 Author Members Share Posted November 23, 2008 AH-HA! I knew I had something hooked up wrong. Well, not "wrong" per se, but certainly not in the optimal manner. I saw there was a balanced TRS line out on each channel, and since I use a TRS patchbay for all my line-level signals, I just went TRS to TRS. But the manual says the TRS line out is at -2dBu while the XLR line out is +4dBu, so I'm dropping down my signal level by doing this. When I get in the studio this evening I'll replace the TRS cable with an XLR to TRS cable. That should help. I knew something was off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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