Three MIC PREAMPS compared! Can you hear the difference?

let's talk about microphone pre-amplifiers today I want to do a mic pre shootout unlike any mic pre-shoot out you've seen before I'm going to compare three very different mic pre-designs from quite affordable to quite expensive from what they call clean sounding to what they call highly colored sounding we're gonna record vocals but here's the fun part we're gonna use them the normal way but we're also going to drive them into Distortion we're gonna hit them hard we're gonna make them sing so they show us their true character if you thought mic pres were boring you might want to check this out have a listen [Music] foreign [Music] for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage [Music] [Music] take a look out brother [Music] caged and as you know if we do tests and shootouts on this channel we always try to make them properly so let me explain the setup the differences between mic preamps can be very subtle so I believe it's highly important to actually record the exact same performance if you want to compare those preamps because the difference between one take and another might already be bigger than the difference between the preamps so today we are using a mic Splitter from ADT athlete at tonkun's very transparent sounding mic splitter so we're going to record the same performance with three different mic preamps and that way we can make sure we're actually comparing Apples to Apples and like I told you I want to test those preamps with different settings so I want to go from clean to really really dirty I'm going to hit them really hard believe me I'm going to fully crank those preamps without distorting my Converse and I have invited a good friend of mine he's the singer guitarist and producer of the band white you really want to check out that band they're great there's a link below vintage rock band with Jess and disco and Space Rock influences check them out they're great you just you just heard him and we he spontaneously came up with a riff and a song and we recorded that and I made him record the song made him perform a few times and we were going from clean to more and more distorted lots of fun right the microphone we were using is a Austrian audio OC 818 this is the smaller brother actually my favorite vocal mic at the moment you can just throw it at anything actually actually one of my desert island microphones because it just sounds great as drum overheads great on a guitar cab great as a vocal mic highly recommended links to all the gear below as usual so we were going from that microphone into the ADT my splitter another link below into the three preamps and now it's time to introduce our three contenders the first one is this it is the audient ID 24 and you might say hey why is he showing us like an affordable or interface USB interface or something well there's something you might not know about this mic pre the cool thing about audient is that they have put their class a mic pre taken from their big analog consoles which sound great by the way into the entire ID range so if you buy any of the ID interfaces smaller or bigger one you get exactly the same mic pre like you get in the bigger audience consoles and that might pre sounds great I've just worked on one of their on their biggest console in London a few months ago and made a great sounding drum recording so this is a highly recommended mic pre especially if you don't have the money to afford something super fancy uh this really gets the job done and sounds great um it is known to be on the clean side that's what people say audience M sound clean but today I'm gonna fully crank this thing into Distortion I don't think anybody has ever done that I can already see some people at audient getting nervous maybe no that's fun let's crank this thing and the price for this one depending on which interface you buy can be below 100 euros per Channel which is pretty ridiculous for a mic pre like this the next preamp I want to show you is also a preamp that I use a lot that I have been using for years that I really like it comes from warm audio and it's warm audio's take on the American classic mic pre-design from the 70s API and this one is called wa412 a four Channel preamp with around I think in Germany it's around 300 Euros per channel so already three times the price of the audient and it's supposed to sound a lot more colored you know input output Transformers discrete op amp the input impedance is quite a bit lower compared to the audience so this is supposed to have a little more of a sound especially if you hit it hard what I like about warm audio I gotta say that is they make great products that sound great that feel great I mean this has been here for years we have several warm audio devices here in our studio it's kind of affordable but they use high quality components and um I'm actually using the warm audio wa412 more because I also have eight channels of real API preamps but I'm actually using the warm audio a lot more it sounds super close that's one thing and the other thing is it has an output trim which makes it a lot easier to drive that thing especially for today's tests I think the newer API for channel preamps also have that I have the old ones they can't do that and I need an analog pad and stuff so mostly I just go for the warm audio I like it to distort my room mics and I like that tone switch on guitar sometimes if you use Dynamic mics it's a cool preamp but again 300 euro per Channel compared to 100 euro already a little more a little more money let's move on so now we have a clean sounding class a preamp quite affordable then we have something that is a little more expensive and supposed to be a little more colored sounding so now I was looking for something super dirty for the most dirty preamp out there I was actually looking for a preamp called the gas cooker but they don't make it anymore so I was like what am I gonna get and then at NAMM 23 warm audio released this thing called the w a m p x and I was like this is what I want because it is based on the tube amp of an Ampex tape machine it has three tubes it has cinemat Transformers it's intended to be driven hard it's intended to go dirty that's the whole point here right it has an inbuilt tape saturation even inbuilt filters so this design is supposed to go dirty which means perfect so we cover the entire range it range from clean to dirty foreign foreign right now the price for one channel here is six to seven hundred euros so once again quite a lot more money but then again it also has a lot more features than the others so time to get dirty let's start recording so here we are in Cubase and as I've told you you see here we've recorded several takes of the same song and we're going from something like this to something like this [Music] so from clean to very very distorted let's start with the clean recording and you can always see those three tracks the first one is always the audient the second one is the warm audio wa412 and the third one is the warm audio tube preamp the wa m p x that you can see right here and I will be unmuting those tracks you can see that here and sometimes I will just solo them like this and I'm not using any EQ on those tracks you might want to add some EQ later to tame the highs especially if you distort vocals and I'm not using any Reverb right now which sounds a little weird but you know we just want to compare the preamps that's why what I am using is a waves uh R Vox compressor on all of them it just makes it easier to judge because otherwise especially the quieter moments will just disappear same settings on all three tracks let's go [Music] oh brother brother take a look yourself [Music] looking for my mistakes while sitting in your mental case all right I gotta say they all sound pretty close to each other in this setting let's just Loop one of his lines here and have a listen a take a look at yourself there is a difference but it is very very subtle and you can actually hear it a little better if we go to this one over here I want you to focus on the transients and on the high frequency details let's have a listen doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubting me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubting me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubting me for my mistakes while sitting there and I've been switching between the audient and the warm audio to preamp and I feel like the audience sounds a little more extended in the high end and it feels like the audience has faster transients which makes things sound a little more open and a little more fast and in your face which I guess is just more accurate whereas the two band from warm audio seems to round off of the transients a little bit slightly which actually makes it sound really nice have another lesson start with the audience doubting me in me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubting me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care I hope you can hear what I mean so I feel like the audience is actually the more natural representation of what's going on but yeah the warm audio just sounds especially in this case sounds a little nicer maybe because we have a very aggressive vocal take and it tames things a little bit and makes it sounds a little more round and warm nevertheless this is really really close I also want to show you the um wa412 which is actually closer to the tube amp let's switch one more time between the three doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mantle cage out in me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage out in me for my mistakes while sitting in your mouth there is no difference in quality for me it's just the warm audio priest and make things sound a little more I don't know how you call this a little warmer it's warm audio right so now it depends on what you want if you want something really accurate uh I would actually go for for the audience if you want something rounder that's maybe the right word you go for any of the warm audio preamps all right let's move on the next thing I tried was pushing each of the three preamps like slightly into Distortion so they create some harmonics you know to find a sweet spot for each of them let's have a listen take a look at yourself [Music] take a look at yourself take a look at yourself and one thing that was surprising was that you can actually distort all those three preamps in a pretty nice way I wasn't expecting that let's just go to the same line like before and let's have a listen doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cave first thing I notice is that both warm audio priests now sound louder by the way I've level matched them like like the Peaks are Level matched so there seems to be a little more compression going on in the two warm audio preamps let me just go back from the tube to the audient doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental case counted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cave overall I feel like the two version sounds a little Fuller and once again the audience has a little more high frequency detail but also sounds a little more harsh now let me show you one more really interesting thing which kind of shows you how the Distortion sounds on each of the preamps if we look at this here look how shaved off the waveform is on both the audient and the warm audio 412. it really looks like hard clipping it looks like like clipping your converter or something and the tube amp has a way smoother waveform here and that is no matter how hard you drive them it's always the same thing so the other two the solid state preamps always look clipped at some point whereas the two preamp always looks it looks more like a like a distorted guitar waveform or something which just shows me it goes into Distortion more smoothly and that brings us to take number three where we went a little further one more time and I can tell you it was much easier to dial in a usable amount of distortion and like like slowly dial that in on this one here compared to any of the other two preamps let me just explain one thing um in case you have asked yourself how could I how can I drive the audience preamp that hard and the trick was this the audience because it's an interface it's not a standalone preamp so I was going with a mic of course into the mic pre and then audience has a balanced insert by the way that is so cool thank you audience for adding a balanced insert that is just such a professional feature for a small interface like this so I was because at some point if you push the preamp you're gonna clip the converters inside of this thing so I used the insert to go into a line input of my interface which takes up to I think more than 30 DB plus 30 DB so I could really crank it without clipping my converters but then again on both the audient and the warm audio 412 it was much more difficult to find a sweet spot because they both suddenly went from clean into Distortion whereas the tube amp has a very smooth transition from clean to the store I'm going to show you later and you can hear that in the next take let's use our usual line and switch between the different preamps so you can see there's not much change on the audience evil my mistakes while sitting in your mental care and uh for 12. doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care whereas a tube amp you can already see that Daddy for Mommy Mommy for my mistakes while sitting in your manta caves doubted me for Mommy [Music] and once again look at the waveform here even if the tube version sounds way more distorted it looks a lot more natural than the other two you can just tell that the other two are not intended for that kind of tone maybe but let's go totally crazy on the last take I was fully cranking all three preamps that is maximum Distortion coming from the preamp again without clipping your converters and you can see that right here they all look like sausages now look at this so let's see audience me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage has anyone ever abused an audience preamp to do that I'm not sure but I'm quite excited because it still sounds cool by the way for for a sound like this you really need to tame the higher frequencies so you need an EQ like this while sitting in your man 2K shouted me for my mistakes while sitting in your man too so let's compare this with and without the EQ okay where are we here audience doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage evil Mommy sticks while sitting in your man 2K shouted me for my mistake yeah the audience sounds a little more nasty in the upper mids compared to the 412. it's wrong sitting in your mantle cave shouted me it also rounds off the highs nicely evil Mommy full tube [Music] there's way more Distortion compared to the other ones the other ones the other ones just can't distort that much let's compare again with the filter on my Xbox while sitting in your man 2K shouted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care it gets closer you see so they can all be used for that kind of stuff I just feel like the tube the MPX from warm audio has the most complex Distortion it just sounds a little more sophisticated and a little less nasty sometimes you can also hear that especially in the low end that sometimes even the singer was complaining about that that with the other two the 412 and the audience you get those weird that weird Distortion in the low end like take a look at yourself that happens a lot less with the tube design you can just tell it's designed to be abused like that three great preamps audience being the most transparent so if that's what you want I mean you should you just get the audience that's fine or if you don't want an interface you get one of audience multi-channel preamps I think they have an eight Channel version of that one and save the money the 412 already has a little more Mojo has a smoother top end has a big low end sounds really nice and takes the Distortion a little better and the tube thing which I will show you in a minute uh is a totally different beast and can do a lot more is a real tone machine so to say and that's what we're gonna do now the really cool thing about this preamp is that it has three switchable inputs so it has a mic input it has a line input and it has an instrument input that means you can not only plug in a mic and record like we did with this thing you can also send your pre-recorded tracks through the balanced lining into the unit and distort them later and you can even reamp something or plug in a guitar and use the Distortion there really really cool that's what we're gonna do now so and now I'm gonna take the clean audient track let's go back to our line here and I will send it through the warm audio through the line in and I'll show you all the nice features while sitting in your mental cage shouted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage look how smoothly you can die in the distortion um first one is the tone which lowers the impedance which is the most subtle effect and is I'm pretty sure it's more obvious if you have a dynamic or a ribbon mic mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubted me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental care doubting me I feel it thickens and warms up the tone a little bit before ma a lot more interesting is this one the tape saturation have a listening [Music] cranking the gain it also rounds off the highs it's hard to hear right now because of all the added harmonics but I will show you in a minute really cool [Music] and all those harmonics lead us to the next function here which is the two kilohertz low pass filter which is really cool have a listen ing for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage out in me for my mistakes while sitting in your mental cage dear people at warm audio if you want to improve this please add more frequencies to that filter because that filter is really really nice it's just a little too extreme sometimes so having something like 2K 4K and 6K would be so cool it would make this a lot more versatile and if you add a lot of distortion always makes sense to turn on the high pass filter because you don't really want all that low end going into the distortion [Music] and now have a listen if I use more Distortion you can hear how the tape saturation adds even more Distortion but also rounds of the highs a little bit okay your mom is six round six so we have more mid-range Distortion but less of the very high sizzles so that means if you are afraid of distorting your vocals during the recording session or if you want to use a cleaner sounding preamp because you don't know what you want to distort them in the first place or not uh like we do now we record something with the audience and then we distort it later this is really really powerful take a look yourself father take a look at yourself and this is not only interesting for vocals because on the playback that you've been hearing all the time I've actually used this one pretty much every track so for example let's have a listen to the bass the bass sounds like this [Laughter] and originally this is the most boring sounding bass ever it's just the stock base preset in contact in the contact library and it sounds like this [Music] program base obviously and I send it through the MPX and it sounds like this and I gotta say in the mix it really sounds cool [Music] and now listen to this we also have a roads here from waves uh this one here or some kind of electric piano this one here and originally it sounds like this but I turned into this this so Bass from two and piano oh my God [Applause] [Music] that's a real tone machine that's a lot of fun if you want to go dirty okay everybody I hope this was interesting let me sum it up one more time we've tested three preamps and I think they all have their oh my God in German we say daza inspirational the reason to exist maybe yeah the reason to exist all right I hope you enjoyed this presentation uh let me know which one which one you prefer which one is your favorite are you like more the clean or the dirty type of guy do you distort your preamps when you record when do you do it how do you do it and what gear do you use and uh um yeah do we have any audience lovers out there any warm audio lovers uh leave a comment let me know what you think let me know which one is your favorite and don't forget to subscribe to this Channel and also ring the bell and if you want to hear more about all the stuff that I do about my own Academy Cola audio called and about the products I release there's also an email list below I'm sure you want to subscribe there and sell your soul to the devil alright thanks for watching it was a lot of fun to do this and to get dirty with you I see you in hell bye bye [Music] take a look at yourself take a look at yourself take a look at yourself [Music] when I was young I didn't want to fly I just walked like the other guy [Music] [Music] down [Music] foreign

Channel: Kohle Audio Kult

Views: 11,540

Keywords: warm audio, audient, id24, neve, api, 1176, 1073, mic preamp, solid state logic, mic pre shoot-out, kristian kohle, vocals, preamp distortion

Id: f5WcOvWevE4

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023