I like having them around and playing with options. I just wouldn't give the advise that people need to spend thousands of dollars on recording front end when you can get as good to great results with preamps that are a lot cheaper than a BAE 1073. I'd rather have decent preamps and a bunch of weird mics because that is where my sickness thrives. preamps are fucking cool, but they don't make or break a good recording.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sun Mar 15, 2026 3:41 pm There have been a couple times in the past where changing out a preamp did improve the source I was using, but that only happened when I had a Chandler TG2 for a little while, which had a distinct color that I didn’t like when it was apparent. I’ve also had issues with other preamps that have weird gain staging where just putting a condenser mic near a source might require a pad.

It's funny you mention it- after getting more preamp agnostic the last several years, I got a TG2 for my 500 rack. It was really the first time in a long time where I didn't feel like you had to squint to make out a meaningful difference. But that means it really has a flavor to it, so I can see ditching it if you don't love it.

Two other gear bro myths I find the internet has turned into a received wisdom, that are pretty overblown.

1. Stacking a type of preamp on multiple channels is where you really hear its virtues multiply. I tried this. Without nuking everything for some saturation character I found it was actually more difficult to hear differences across whole mixes than individual elements.

2. Like above, but this time instead of the secret sauce, stacking tracks with the same preamp is a problem because some characteristics will build up and be too much. Like dude, you have to season your Neve tracks with Api for contrast.

I'm sure you could find a way to push very character pieces into either of these examples, but in realistic/average use they just sound like good ideas.

I will say that I'm cool with only having one TG2, first because they're ridiculously expensive and second because I definitely don't need that character across the board. I'll happily use any of my other variety of normal pres in whatever combination occurs to me.

losthighway wrote: Mon Mar 16, 2026 6:12 pm It's funny you mention it- after getting more preamp agnostic the last several years, I got a TG2 for my 500 rack. It was really the first time in a long time where I didn't feel like you had to squint to make out a meaningful difference. But that means it really has a flavor to it, so I can see ditching it if you don't love it.

Oh yeah for the TG2 - part of that story I left out is that I paid out the ass for the rack version and ate a chunk of that when I sold it. So there was some buyer’s remorse there that set in fairly quickly, though I did my best to give it an honest try, it bummed me out when I realized I couldn’t use it for everything.

A 500 pre or 2 wouldn’t be so bad but for the money is makes me sick to think about. It seemed like the ones listed used at the time I bought mine weren’t that far off from the new ones (as it works out sometimes), but the market wasn’t so kind when it was time to sell.

Maybe I would like the tube or germanium one better but I just decided to stick with Spectra until it’s time to get rid of all of them for something else. By the way, the nice thing about 500 series stuff is that things sell very quickly and you don’t take as bad of a hit.