r/audioengineering • u/josephallenkeys • Jun 26 '26
Discussion Dad has spoken. Now behave, kids.
Sorry, I meant Dan. Dan has spoken.
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u/g_spaitz Jun 26 '26
So the actual bottom line is that what's really overblown is the reaction to it and we can finally stop having 20 posts a day in here?
I definitely welcome that.
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u/keep_trying_username Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I think it goes further than that. I think the real bottom line is that we've been in an echo chamber and we need to be open to new ideas and new information. We need to stop repeating the things that we've heard people say or read on the internet, when we don't really understand the thought behind what we're reading.
When someone in the 1970s/80s/90s said "the Neve preamps sounds warm and fat" they might have been comparing it to the crappy, tinny preamp in the RadioShack tape deck they had in high school or the sound from the crappy school intercom system, because the Neve they heard in a recording studio was literally the first transparent preamp in a quality audio system they had ever heard. Years later people keep saying "Neve preamps sounds warm and fat" without understanding it's only in comparison to actual jumk.
Those Neves are actually transparent unless you do the whole "crank the gain lower the fader" thing. A transparent or mostly transparent preamp in 1970 was a thing of beauty. Now we have many budget transparent preamps available and they aren't junk, but people have been conditioned to say that cheap gear is junk, so people have been inventing reasons why they think a is better.
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u/killrdave Jun 26 '26
Said it before but the mods should control this better. There was a new post on the same topic every couple of hours at one point which should have been comments on the original thread. Some people feel their thoughts are special and warrant a new post to spam the front page.
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u/pianotherms Jun 26 '26
I have to say, I have enjoyed the last week of amped-up preamp discussion.
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u/andreacaccese Professional Jun 26 '26
DW has the most sobering takes on everything
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u/milkolik Jun 26 '26
Kind of sad we need to appeal to authority to resolve this debate. Jill's video has all the information you need to figure out pres are irrelevant in 95% of the cases.
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u/andreacaccese Professional Jun 26 '26
I mean the core point is that whether you have Abbey Road all to yourself or a cheap ass audio interface in a basement, the thing that will always matter most of what you do with the gear
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u/etherealwasp Jun 28 '26
It’s way easier buying a new piece of recording gear than spending hours practicing your instrument to improve the input! I’m definitely guilty there
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u/AngleProlapse Jun 26 '26
A rare actual working engineer making YouTube videos, amongst the sea of career YouTubers making mixing videos.
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u/Front_Ad4514 Professional Jun 27 '26
Working on what? Does Dan have real credits of any kind?
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u/breadinabox Jun 26 '26
The thing about this famous consoles is there were the best sounding things AT THE TIME
so when these bands made these classic albums, they attribute the quality of the sound to those consoles, because the alternatives sounded worse.
Then we made good sounding consoles cheaper!
Now they're cheap as fuck.
It's not that the consoles sound good, it's that they don't sound bad. the line of famous consoles were the first ones that were adequately clear. Until then things sounded bad, but they finally, and intentionally I will emphasize, made clear, non colouring recordings. That's why everyone was obsessed with them.
I will bet anything that the advertising campaigns for those consoles were for their clarity and not their color. That's what they did the separated them, they were clean.
It's not hard to get a clean preamp now, so new preamps are just as good. The first waves of digital preamps were not as good but they now are
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u/goyo-lake Jun 26 '26
I have to disagree with most of this comment. The famous consoles were great sounding at the time and are still great sounding now. They were designed in a very musical way as well as technical.
Yes there were some happy accidents like running the pres super hot so that you would be farther away from the noise level of tape and general analog circuit noise and that produced nice saturation and compression, but to say they “didn’t sound bad” is an understatement. The people behind Neve, Api, Harrison, etc. were extremely competent engineers. They made excellent coloring consoles and excellent clean consoles, each with it’s target audience.
Clean preamps and converters are great and cheap nowadays, and we have some great preamp emulation technologies that can get you really far. However, discrete analog preamps still sound different and for some use cases, they’re irreplaceable because they provide a very quick workflow towards a great sound.
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u/milkolik Jun 26 '26
They were designed in a very musical way
What do you mean by this?
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u/Strict-Basil5133 Jun 27 '26
Sorry, going to butt in just because I've thought about it a lot in recent months using the 1073 EQ. After using the UAD plug the last year, I think it's musically genius. It's three bands and the high and low are limited shelving types...little flexibility, but I can often accomplish everything I need to with that plug in because of how it cuts the more you add/subtract. In 30 seconds, I can eq something with a 1073 that's either 90% there or 100% there. It's hard to make that EQ sound bad...it can sound too much or or not enough, but never unmusical or strange IMO.
Something else it can do that no other EQ has for me is making things sound huge/bring things forward in the mix when using it as an additive eq. If you add high and low and leave the mids alone (or add a little in the high mids/highs) the source can sound bigger than it really is and it comes forward.
It kind of blows me away that R Neve figured that out when he had to. At the time, no DAWs and the console EQ was often the only EQ or one of very few available. I wouldn't have normally thought that you could mix an entire record with one non-adjustable-q mid band and shelving highs and lows at predetermined freqs. In a good room, I've not doubt you could now. In my not great room, it can still handle 90% and I might have to notch out a couple of weirdo freqs.
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u/milkolik Jun 27 '26
I actually agree! Good frequency selection and curves. Also limitations are a good thing 95% of the time!
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u/iscreamuscreamweall Mixing Jun 26 '26
it depends what you mean by great though doesnt it? no serious classical engineer who records symphony orchestras would use a neve 1073 or a helios preamp over a modern clean integrated interface pre. from that perspective, a vintage console channel may not "still sound great" to some users
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u/fuckityfucky Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Yep. I think also people are gonna start extrapolating a lot of assumptions because of the Jim Lill video. Say what you want about the importance of preamps, but a lot of those classic desks absolutely have a vibe to them, as with a lot of vintage gear. But of course (it kind of goes without saying hopefully) you dont need that to make good music.
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u/PushingSam Location Sound Jun 26 '26
The main takeaway from this is that people still claim a load of this, but as soon as evidence is concerned, everything is about avoiding that, the methodology doesn't fit them, they're not scientists, they're not data collectors, they're too busy, they're the only ones good enough to hear it, and what have you.
We have claims on one side, and a singular data point on the other (one Neve vs. one Focusrire). People discussing around the "hot" item, but never actually putting said hot item on the table.
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u/fuckityfucky Jun 26 '26
Well Ill put it this way, I own a 70s Tascam mini console. Bought it for $100, not an expensive item by any means. When I DI guitar or bass and drive the pre on it, it has a sound. That sound is fun, its different. And I cant get it through my apollo. Do I need it? No. But its vibey, fun and I love it. Thats not a scientific claim, its just me knowing what Im hearing and having a good ol time making music.
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u/PushingSam Location Sound Jun 26 '26
I also own a bunch of analog synths and random peripherals, but 99% of the juju is just in having a fun/interactive interface which leads to the fun part. It obviously beats staring at something like Ableton and clicking around in a random softsynth of choice.
I'm not gonna claim that my Moog shit or my big ass polysynth sounds better, it makes a noise just like the softsynth does. Just with a more engaging mode of use.
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u/Applejinx Audio Software Jun 26 '26
Why would you claim random softsynths sound as good as the Moog? This is getting out of hand. It's not even about the pet synth names, I've got a Novation Summit and it's not even a classic analog polysynth but it still sounds better than my soft synths, and a contributing factor is that it's running a kind of oscillator I experimented with in Eurorack: naively ultra high sample rate gets rid of aliasing better. I was running Eurorack modules at a sample rate of 300k up to a megahertz and they really did work well that way and the Summit does similarly (but much more sophisticated) and that's not even purely analog tech like old Moogs or Polivoks or Arps.
Really? We are really going to say advanced synths don't sound better than J random softsynth?
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u/DrBrown82_ Jun 27 '26
By all means, post your A/B demo and educate us on why a sample rate that's 25 times above the audible Nyquist rate makes a difference.
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u/Applejinx Audio Software Jun 27 '26
If you really think the Summit sounds so bad, don't buy one. It doesn't get that luxurious vibe off having amazingly colorful filters, that side of it is quite boring really. And I could post my Chord Organ modules running at 44.1k vs. 300K or I could just link to the album I did heavily using them which sold pretty good for unpromoted Bandcamp, or better yet stop arguing on reddit and make another :D
If you're gonna unironically run with the wint tweet of "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" then I guess you're not alone, I just wonder what the hell is in it for you? Is it that much fun to go ah ha, everyone is dumb? Is it more fun than playing a musical instrument? I'll grant you, neither of us are playing one right now so what does that tell you ;)
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u/variant_of_me Jun 26 '26
No dude you're just fooling yourself you didn't do a double blind test! It's impossible to know anything unless you do an A/B test!
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u/DrrrtyRaskol Professional Jun 26 '26
It's not that the consoles sound good, it's that they don't sound bad.
Idk, some of these consoles sound awesome. Yes it’s something of an accident of the topologies and components available at the time, especially the output transformers. But it’s difficult to say they sound worse than more modern consoles like SSL etc.
I think some of the big advantages of newer ones are versatility, stability and power consumption. Old Neves drift around a bit with the heat and there’s a level difference if you engage the pan pot etc.
There’s also older tech that sound wonderful too. The Telefunken/Siemens/TAB stuff, Ampex, EMI, UA. 50s and 60s but very hifi.
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u/TheRoaringShells Jun 28 '26
Start with this great clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/QmGk4k_IBgs?si=US9CzEDdDFkvAw4c when Eric Valentine sums up that digital is clean. It was mistaken for fucking up the sound when it really was more accurate. But what does more accurate matter when microphones and speakers already is the huge difference from reality. It's about choosing what sounds best; i.e. less harsh yet more exciting. Sometimes the best analogue gear and emulations have this subtle colour that is perceived as increasing clarity. As if it's even more accurate. That's not it. It highlights the dynamics. what's loud and silent; what's near and what's far; why "depth" actually exists as buzzword, though it is becoming ever more taboo to point it out when it comes to analogue colouration.
Also Marshall is a legendary brand only because Jim Marshall saw kids liking Fenders 50s designs that distorted a lot, and in a tasty sounding way, yet Leo Fender wanted to make cleaner into oblivion (meaning like infinite watt silver panel ones that costs nothing compared to other vintage gear).
The Beatles; you know, the biggest fucking band ever, drove their tube consoles into the red and they did it even though adults didn't like that and tried to stop it. The first solid state consoles had harder clipping and were disliked and harder to navigate for Ken Scott and Geoff Emerick.
The the u87 was widely rejected, when came as a solid state improvement to the u67, as it didn't sound as good. They just listened and heard that.
Bill Schnee tells the funny story about how Neumann came to studios and told technicalities of the improvement that just plainly were ignored for the sound. This timestamp: https://youtu.be/jzLe8YsVHOg?si=uJdIv0fHuPmBu86r&t=5673
It isn't popular but I mostly disagree with Dan Worrall's video and I think I have another perspective. He comes from a time of myths roaming free. Now we don't really. I have been learning the audio engineering craft specifically the last 7-9 years and I haven't been tricked into buying into any myths. I specifically did not buy a preamp.
What I see are kids r/guitar creeping up into other forums and saying "what are these racks of gears doing. These supposed professionals must be stupid". There was this girl that felt vindicated that analogue preamps actually don't have sound you can like. It just threw fire on further confusion. Like; she might trust that differences don't exist in plugins and ignore her ears.
Kids with modellers at live gigs nearly always sound worse than before. They think bleed is bad. Modellers are great. THEY DON'T LISTEN and realise that PAs at their kind of gigs work best if they have all vocals and first augment kicks and then more and more shells, and really should be accompanied by cabs that are in themselves voiced to sound right standing on stage. Better than a PA fed by modeller. Midrange presence is gone and too harsh, and low mids and bass power of the amps being coupled to the stage floor is also gone. With huge acts I get it, because big stages have no augmentation left. But modellers have to some degree fucked up the small to medium-large size gig sounds I've ever heard.
Modellers are expensive and not serviceable. A clean power amp; really fucking expensive. Bad consumer advice.
I don't trust Jim Lill's intensions when randomly having a favourite record that has a clean neve so he doesn't choose the 1073. Dan only had some very subtle words on that a 1073 would be different and not emphasising that more all plays into caressing the confused and falsely enlightened kids, because his bias is about too much against old gear sommeliers, which are an enemy of the past.
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u/Applejinx Audio Software Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Agreed that a 1073 comparison would've been more appropriate. Note that the 1073 pre uses input AND output transformers, kinda like the API pres I like. Scarletts have neither because they're expensive, and the 88r has electronically balanced outputs, not output transformers.
Transformers are weird and interesting. They sound cool but they're bandpasses and have their own kind of saturation that is always present, and even when you do use modern ones (again, like my API ones, or those in the Heritage Audio stuff I've also used) you don't get to have them be the same as the vintage ones because transformers used to be made with different materials that aren't legal to build anymore (namely, molybdenum which is super toxic, but was getting used by Triad for the transformers that ended up getting used for 'Wolfboxes')
It's not impossible that Behringer will run off and endanger some workers making molybdenum transformers somewhere there's no OSHA, and that there'll be cheap interfaces and such things that compete on the terms of the legacy gear. These aren't magic things, people know what makes them different, sometimes it's things like that which jack up the prices of the once-normal and now-precious gear, and you can legitimately ask whether you like the sound of the transformer-coupled outputs or (like in some fancy microphones!) you're just as happy with electronically balanced output stages, perhaps with way higher slew rates on tap, and the different sounds those make.
You can legitimately say the higher-slew-rate transformerless circuits are more accurate and still be missing the point.
Throw out the cost factor and the things are still different and all these things are in fact different. The really expensive transformer-output pres saturate in the highs before they distort anything else because that's what transformers do, the really cheap interfaces have miserable power supply circuitry and don't handle dynamics gracefully but in a completely different way, the really modern ones have incredibly tiny circuit traces as they're built like phones, and all these things have distinct kinds of sound for people to like or not like.
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u/KS2Problema Jun 26 '26
As more than a couple of us pointed out earlier, many of the people reacting in performative horror to the Jim Lill video managed to ignore a lot of important qualifiers and provisos in his busy video. Lill did not say that there is no difference between preamps or that they all behave in precisely the same manner under all circumstances. But over and over again we saw people rush to engage and argue with just such unmade claims.
And Reddit is far from the only discussion venue which has seen such attempts at dialogue descend into contentious deadlock over misunderstood or misstated positions. I'm old and I have been discussing audio online since the late 1980s (in the dial-up BBS era).
People have a tendency to oversimplify or exaggerate points of the arguments they attempt to participate in, particularly oversimplifying the arguments of those whose 'positions' they oppose - because, of course, it is much easier to argue against a poorly qualified, absolutist position (that one has attributed to the other side) than to pick apart a carefully qualified, evidentially supported, rational argument.
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
There has been a crazy amount of strawmaning of Jim Lill's claims, and it has been very disheartening to see the responses from engineers who I feel like should know better. I think performative horror is a really good way to put it. Some of the responses to Lill have also gotten pretty nasty. I can name more than a few folks (particularly on Instagram) who were heriling some pretty ugly insults. It's crazy that such a lighthearted video talking about audio gear provoked such a strong reaction.
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
People usually get pissy when you challenge their religious beliefs held on pure faith instead of evidence.
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
many of the people reacting in performative horror to the Jim Lill video managed to ignore a lot of important qualifiers and provisos in his busy video
Petition to rename the sub to audioStrawmanning, your honour.
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u/Optional-Failure Jul 07 '26
But over and over again we saw people rush to engage and argue with just such unmade claims.
And I've never seen anyone in here claim that Scarlett interfaces or Behringer desks aren't good enough for decent recordings, but I saw a bunch of people start arguing against that, too.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26
Lill did not say that there is no difference between preamps or that they all behave in precisely the same manner under all circumstances
Exactly, and in fact, he measured, admitted and demonstrated that they are indeed different. The question in that discovery was then whether the difference was audible enough, or otherwise achievable by another (cheaper) means.
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u/GerhardtDH Jun 26 '26
The major criticism was that he made generalizations from a small sample of one preamp that's made to be as transparent as possible until it can't then hard clips. So the fact that he pointed out how little the differences are is beside the point of the criticism. I don't remember Jim bringing up other types of preamps that can soft clip. Apparently Jim didn't learn about the class of amps that the AP Mastering guy explained in his last two videos, this made Jim jump to a conclusion that was too broad.
However Jim's broader points about the freedom of not needing to drop $10,000 on niche vintage preamp stacks and other insanely expensive shit is great. A lot of people here are focusing on the wrong points and I can see quite a lot of posters who obviously didn't watch the video or only watched the first 3 minutes. Not you, just in general.
Inb4 Jim releases "Where DOES the tone come from in a class-a pre-amp?"
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
The major criticism was that he made generalizations from a small sample of one preamp that's made to be as transparent as possible until it can't then hard clips. So the fact that he pointed out how little the differences are is beside the point of the criticism. I don't remember Jim bringing up other types of preamps that can soft clip. Apparently Jim didn't learn about the class of amps that the AP Mastering guy explained in his last two videos, this made Jim jump to a conclusion that was too broad.
Have you watched the video? At the start he specifically states that he's looking for where the magic Neve sound lives in the console that made his favourite records. So he investigates the preamp model that console uses, and concludes that there is no magic Neve sound in the pre. If you can point me to the part where he says his findings apply to all preamps, I'd be grateful.
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u/FadeIntoReal Jun 26 '26
I had plenty of opportunities to record with shitty preamps back in the day. The room I started in had only a half dozen good preamps and it was always an interesting triage to determine which signals were most important and got one of the few good channels.
Many talented EEs worked hard to give us ICs that could be used by less talented circuit designers, or just save other designers from reinventing the wheel, resulting in preamps that perform amazingly well at little expense. I have a great deal of respect for the work of those people who forever changed recording for the better. I have less respect for those who continuously trumpet the next fashionable preamp trying to make a quick buck.
The character that a less-than-perfect preamp can add to a track can be a perfectly valid artistic choice but when I hear a final mix that’s mediocre enough that no one actually can tell what preamp you’ve used, it raises questions about the alleged talent of the user of those preamps and how the effort could’ve been better placed.
For decades I’ve met strong opposition for opinions like these. The opposition hasn’t changed my opinions in the slightest.
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u/dub_mmcmxcix Audio Software Jun 26 '26
preamps were NOT all equal in the 90s
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u/termites2 Jun 26 '26
Not all equal certainly, but there were plenty of cheap ones indistinguishable from today's cheap preamps.
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u/dub_mmcmxcix Audio Software Jun 26 '26
i wrecked a session i tracked with a Behringer dual rack preamp in 2002.
channel 1 had guitar.
channel 2 had guide vox.
when channel 2 clipped, channel 1 sagged and distorted and wrecked the keeper track.
they both sounded fine and probably measured ok individually though.
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u/termites2 Jun 26 '26
Sure, there are always some badly designed preamps, even today, but there would have been plenty of good mic preamps available back in 2002 as well.
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u/GrecianDesertUrn69 Jun 26 '26
So... what beginner gear is recommended?
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u/iscreamuscreamweall Mixing Jun 26 '26
these days? pretty much any interface above behringer level has great preamps. scarlett, UAD volt, SSL, MOTU. cant really good wrong. pick whatever has the I/O and connectivity you need in your budget
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u/I_am_better_than_him Jun 26 '26
Even Behringer preamps are perfectly fine for someone with a Behringer budget
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u/Optional-Failure Jul 07 '26
A Scarlett Solo and a UMC 404 are pretty much going to be functionally identical, in that the vast majority of people won't be able to tell them apart when listening to the final output.
For desks, a number of folks still use X/M 32s.
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
Can't go wrong with a Focusrite Scarlett :)
If you're reeaaallllyyy on a budget the Behringer UMC lineup exists....
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u/tyhart8787 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Dan’s response was good but I really think JK Blair nailed it
https://youtu.be/WIm_1Vglvs4?is=81BIMR4fxn58Oo1O
Edit: JJ Blair
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26
The white paper he refers to is from AGH, not ACG University, BTW, if anyone wanted to read it.
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
Also his claim that they did blind ABX testing is wrong as far as I can see. What the AGH paper actually does is cite to another paper which demonstrates that in a controlled environment, participants can accurately distinguish changes in decibels down to fractions of a db, and the AGH paper cites this to reason that the fraction of a db change they see in the tonality of tone woods means that the different wood types MAY be distinguishable to guitar players. The problem is that the "MAY" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Hearing a fraction of a db change in tonality in a sine wave in a controlled lab environment is very different from hearing the difference between your alder and ash solid body guitars on stage or in a rehearsal room with a full band playing loudly in the same room :| I think it was a little disingenuous of JJ to claim science "already proved tone wood is a thing"
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26
Yeah, I've been stumped to find that study/extension, so I'm honestly dubious until I can find that to verify.
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
It's also only 1 study. It's absolutely not nothing! Good science is not having a firm opinion until LOTS of tests and studies have been written. What's not good science is "This one study says the thing I wanted to hear, that's why this other person's tests are invalid! We have the ONE study that proves everything!"
Maybe tone wood is real, maybe it's a miniscule effect, maybe it's a myth. My money is on 'it makes very little difference'. Maybe the discourse around it will encourage others to do more testing on it. We definitely don't have "definitive proof that Tone Wood is real!"
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Very well spoken, my friend. Too often, citations of scientific research are narrow, as you describe. If there's a paper on it, there should be another and another, otherwise, it's still theory. And that goes for Jim's videos, too. So it's good he encourages more investigation from anyone that has means!
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u/ArkyBeagle Jun 26 '26
We'd need to know A Lot to know whether tantalum caps matter and, for that matter, why. There are a complex suite of tradeoffs in capacitor choice.
Jim actually debunked slew rate; at most, slew rate will roll off high end. All the chips and almost all transistors in the last several decades have slew rate way above what's needed. A figure for TL072 ( a really old opamp ) is 13V/us which is plenty. Slew rate of 5 to 7 seems to be acceptable for audio. The 1072 is actually a family and there's some variation.
If you listen to his null test ( it's called a null test, JJ...) the delta sounds terrible, as isolated harmonic distortion always does. It's presumably attributed to the 1073. Mixed in? Who actually knows?
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
I really disagree. JJ made a LOT of claims without actually doing any testing himself, and it seems like he took Jim's video a little too personally... to the point where it seems like he's trying to do more of a call-out then a response :/ it's a bad look.
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u/exitof99 Jun 26 '26
No need for the tracking ID (?is=), but thanks for the alert.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26
Interesting! I had no idea that's what was there. This is the default link YT gives me, obviously. How do I get rid of that tracking ID without breaking the link?
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u/exitof99 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, you only need the video ID that's 11 characters long. They started adding the "si" parameter a few years ago and I've been spreading the worse since. I don't know when they started using the "is" parameter, maybe that's only for the shortened version.
You can cut it off or have some fun and change it to something else to feed the machine some noise.
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u/keep_trying_username Jun 26 '26
I think we'll see a lot of experienced people have this sort of opinion. It's true that if you push an old preamp (crank the gain and lower the fader) it will have character unique to the hardware. But much of the time the vocals are recorded with cleaner preamp settings, and guitar character came from the guitar itself as well as the pedals and guitar's preamp and DI.
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u/Strict-Basil5133 Jun 26 '26
I promise to behave! The only thing that’s been controversial is Jim’s claim at the end that preamps sound exactly the same unless they’re broken and that people push preamps in “0% of cases”. And some of the methodology around testing. I don’t know anybody that would argue against Scarlets.
YouTube and the news are already good at fomenting arguments and confusing people. It just sucked to see that click amplifying strategy in something like pro audio where I go to hide from all of that.
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u/StudioSteve7 Jun 29 '26
He dumps on the Mackie VLZ pres. I have to say that the best live recording I ever made was done with VLZ pres. I can't top it and lord knows I've tried! I've now got a Yamaha DM3 with Dante and it gives me sucky recordings in comparison.
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u/glmastering Jun 26 '26
Cool. The Youtube world has responded. What do the actual people using high end pre amps on big records say? Something like "I like how it sounds" and they just get on with it and don't care? Maybe.
But... If you eat with your eyes, and use a pre amp, and think you hear a difference and it makes your decisions different... then it's doing something potentially positive (or negative?)
Food....or pre amps... for thought.
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u/Optional-Failure Jul 07 '26
What do the actual people using high end pre amps on big records say?
Who cares?
Seriously, who gives a shit?
There's a minimum quality level you need to hit.
Once you hit it, a bunch of other stuff takes precedence in shaping the sound.
And there are number of ~$100 options that hit that bar.
If you have something significantly better, there's no reason to swap it for one of those ~$100 options, and the same is pretty true if you have one of those ~$100 options.
As long what you're hitting that bar, just use what you have/can afford.
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u/CyberTortoisesss Jun 26 '26
What erks me so bad is that a lot of young and aspiring engineers have a limited budget and are looking for the best gear to put their limited money into to see the most improvement in sound. I feel like the first advice for those engineers should ALWAYS be #1 Microphones and #2 Monitors. I think the amount if hype on YouTube and elsewhere over preamps give a false impression that they are more important to invest your limited funds into than they really are, and I think that's bad for young engineers.
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u/termites2 Jun 26 '26
People keep saying 'well yes low end preamps used to be awful', but I think it would be worth doing some actual tests and comparisons.
I wonder if they are falling for the exactly the same biases that people are have with the Focusrite Scarlett, and were just as prevalent in the 90's, and were used by companies like Mackie back then to convince people they needed to buy new preamps, just like today.
Lets look at the first really cheap low end but usable mixing desk, the Seck 18:8:2, released I think in 1984:
Mic EIN at 600 ohm, full gain: -124 dBu.
Distortion (mic input all the way to master outputs) 0.0085% THD at 1kHz.
Frequency response (all outputs from mic/line input): better than +-1db 20hz to 20k.
So, would this sound obviously different to a modern Focusrite or that clean Neve? I think not. Those old workhorses like the Soundcraft and Studiomaster desks sound just fine. Sure, I've used some truly awful preamps in my time, but the idea that all old cheap ones used to be crap is nonsense.
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u/iscreamuscreamweall Mixing Jun 26 '26
i mean im not that old but even i remember the original scarlett preamps, its not that they had some sort of limited frequency response, its that they had a noticeably high noise floor. you couldnt record some dynamic mics with them. now even a 2i2 is quiet enough to get away with a lot more than what was possible with with a budget interface just 10 years ago
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u/termites2 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
The first gen didn't have as much gain, but the noise and distortion was pretty similar to the recent ones, so I would image it's more a combination of low gain and the earlier A/D converters that caused the noise problems.
(46dB with first gen compared to 69dB gain 4th gen)
I do accept that more gain and better converters is an improvement in the Scarlett. However, there were plenty of other better cheap preamps around the time of the first gen, such as the Presonus Firestudio from 5 years before that had 60dB of gain.
So budget interfaces and mic preamps from 10 years ago were often much better than a first generation Scarlett.
Also it appears Jim was using a 1st gen Scarlett in his video?
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u/AL0VESUPREM3 Jun 26 '26
Here’s where the difference matters IMO. Saturation. My neves have an input and output that I can drive and get saturation, which I love (even a little) on drums. That’s where I hear it. If you drive a Mackie pre is does not do the same thing or sound the same. Also, tube Pres sound different as well. The saturation on those are different from my neve.
If you’re recording clean, then yes the music itself and other elements make a bigger difference.
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Jun 26 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AL0VESUPREM3 Jun 26 '26
Yes, but they don’t sound the same. But if you’re happy with it, go for it. I use both depending on the source. For example I don’t saturate vocals while recording, but drums I do. I use plugins like decapitator and tape sims, but I also use real tape. The plugins don’t sound the same but they do give you a type of saturation. Obviously the real deal makes a difference. I only used plugins for many years. Once I got some other gear I realized how different it is, and how much better my mixes sounded good FASTER.
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u/thedld Jun 26 '26
I respect Worrall for his clinical evaluation of tools, make no mistake, but he’s not a guy who has ever worked on a record I care for artistically. I think that gets overlooked a lot.
Sometimes he mixes up technical and artistic opinion in ways that I find unfortunate. This short video is another example: he says that a 1073 comparison would have been a lot more interesting (agreed). But then he goes on to emphasize he thinks preamps don’t matter that much, and he prefers utility-ones over vibey ones.
The man has a right to express his opinions in his videos, of course, but these are artistic opinions. Contrary to his technical knowledge, which is usually very accurate, his artistic credits really aren’t that big. Neither are mine, I hasten to add.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26
To dismiss Dan's artistic credits based on personal taste, while criticising the contamination of his technical knowledge with his personal opinion, is pure irony.
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u/caj_account Jun 26 '26
People are getting so cognitive dissonant that they are trashing Dan. Incredible.
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u/thedld Jun 26 '26
Why is that ironic, exactly? Artistry is a matter of taste, technology isn’t. Is that too difficult for you to deal with?
People treat Dan’s word as gospel around here, and I think it is healthy to point out that that is entirely deserved when it comes to the tech, and… pretty random when it comes to his artistic opinions.
So, when he says that pres are in fact different, but it doesn’t matter for him, then that means he thinks pres are different. And whether that matters for your recording is not for him to decide, but for you and me.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
You complained about his artistic opinion getting in the way of his technical knowledge while expressing your artistic opinion of his artistic opinions being the basis of your discountenance to his overall validity. That's ironic.
"In my opinion, your opinion is incorrect but we shouldn't be talking about opinions, in my opinion." - Irony.
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u/thedld Jun 26 '26
No, I said no such thing. I said people who watch his videos should not confuse his artistic opinions with his technical reporting.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Yes, but also said that you don't artistically rate anything he's worked on. That's your artistic opinion.
This doesn't invalidate what you said, I'm not telling you you're wrong - I didn't even downvote! - It's just ironic.
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u/GreatScottCreates Professional Jun 26 '26
he says that a 1073 comparison would have been a lot more interesting (agreed). But then he goes on to emphasize he thinks preamps don’t matter that much, and he prefers utility-ones over vibey ones.
How on earth are you reading these things to be at odds with each other?
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u/thedld Jun 26 '26
I don’t? I am just pointing out that one is a fact, and the other his opinion.
The reason I point it out is because people go “See? Dan Worrall says preamps don’t make a difference” over this. But that would be wrong.
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u/EdamKeith Jun 26 '26
Yeah. His opinions on loudness wrt club music were absolutely wrong. He leant on his limited venue experience to arrogantly steamroller everyone, and his many minions were thrilled to show master their bellies. It's fine for him to express different opinions like anyone else, but this daft "god" thing is unwarranted and sometimes it goes to his head.
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u/caj_account Jun 26 '26
(1) Drop your video with proof and counter argument or (2) diss Dan with zero evidence, complain with a side of jealousy.
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u/GreatScottCreates Professional Jun 26 '26
We don’t need more videos. We need less videos.
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u/caj_account Jun 26 '26
We need evidence not videos
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u/GreatScottCreates Professional Jun 26 '26
We need mentors and hands on experience more than “evidence”. Evidence will always be debating in this community.
In this specific case, we need more people with their hands on more preamps. This is very easy to solve with 2 preamps in front of you.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
The marketing on this Jim Lil video has been absolutely spot on, can't believe people are still talking about a video which, as far as I can tell, had absolutely zero new information in it.
For all the "people are just salty they bought expensive preamps" beat kiddy bedroom beatmakers who keep reposting this shit, let me assure you that I have a lot of expensive preamps and I'm not salty, I don't feel missold, I know the gear I have sounds great and better than most cheap stuff I've tried out.
I just find it embarrassing how many people who have clearly never owned a decent preamp are shilling this nonsense to make themselves feel better about their zero song credits.
EDIT: Yup, here come the downvotes yet again.
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u/breadinabox Jun 26 '26
Buddy that's not the consensus opinion of the video posted or of most people
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u/GoodTimesDadIsland Jun 26 '26
"I'm not salty!"
-the saltiest guy you've ever seen in your life
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
Excellent imitation of a 14 yr old boy on an XBox FPS voice chat.
You only missed the part where you tell us all you fucked our mums.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 27 '26
Such a classic comeback from somebody who has nothing to add but wants to be involved and look funny.
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
I've been adding contributions to these threads all week but you lot aren't open to non-religious reality, so what else is there to do but mock you.
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u/UnHumano Jun 26 '26
Define “decent preamp”.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
One that doesn't sound bad when overdriven, which is the entire point of picking any external preamp.
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u/UnHumano Jun 26 '26
Isn’t that the point of an overdrive or any other color box, rather than a preamp?
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
No, because those boxes aren't also bringing a microphone-level signal up to a line-level signal at the same time.
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u/UnHumano Jun 26 '26
And that’s because bringing up the level is the main function of a preamp, isn’t it?
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
That's why preamps were created, yes. Ironically, created to sound as clean as possible of course. If only those engineers knew how much arguing would ensue about their dodgy electronics for generations to come...
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u/caj_account Jun 26 '26
Preamps come with tube screamers now?
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u/Standard-Friend6522 Jun 26 '26
Care to share your song credits and music you’ve worked on? Thanks.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
No thankyou, I have never and will never post my personal information on Reddit. Feel free to use that to make yourself feel better too.
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u/superproproducer Jun 26 '26
I’m the same way.. been making records for over 2 decades with close to 100 million sold and I prefer anonymity. I find it absolutely hilarious when some kid who’s been dabbling in recording for a year or so is telling me I know nothing and to for me to dox myself.
No thanks kid, I know who I am and that’s all I care about
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
Hi, Elon Musk here. You know, the richest man in the world, who pays other people to play video games pretending to be him, because I actually suck at most things I do.
I just wanted to say that on the internet you can claim to be anything you want, especially if you provide no evidence.
Just jokes, I'm not really Elon Musk. I'm 3 small dogs stacked up in a trenchcoat.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Ha yup, and say it turns out I'm secretly some other TikToker they follow (spoiler: I'm not) - would that person then completely reverse their way of thinking and agree with me instead?
I suspect they'd just explode.
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u/Standard-Friend6522 Jun 26 '26
I always feel better when someone gets a reality check and called up on their hypocrisy :). Less than 10 minutes after posting? That’s just a cherry on the top. Thank you for making my day! Have a good one as well.
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u/superproproducer Jun 26 '26
There was zero hypocrisy in his posts, sorry mate. You’re arguing with someone spittin truth
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Was this reply written by AI? Because it sounds like it was, which would make sense.
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u/Standard-Friend6522 Jun 26 '26
Was your whole account history written by a bitter know-it-all, “I must have the last word or I’ll lose sleep at night” kind of person? Because it sounds like it was, which would make sense.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
No, I just think it's really quite damaging how obsessed people are these days with following the word of a random YouTuber as gospel rather than just experiencing things for themselves.
It's not about having the last word, it's about hoping that maybe one person out there will read a certain reply and go "that makes sense actually, and I already had some doubts about this; I might go and do some more research".
Probably not, but you can only ever hope.
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u/josephallenkeys Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I'm not going to be someone vehemently defending everything Jim does, but he actively encourages people to do their own research in his videos. Demonstrations of his methods are there to be as transparent as possible and support that encouragement for people to find out themselves. His catch phrase of "I'm just a musician..." might get cliche and come off arrogant, but it's there to say, "If I can, you can." Given that you would like to encourage the same, do you find this commendable, at least? (Related course he's now advertising aside...)
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Oh absolutely, I'm all up for telling people to just try things for themselves - that's probably what I spend 90% of my time on here doing.
My criticism of this particular video is twofold:
He compared a famously clean preamp to another clean preamp. Nobody denies that preamps have to be expensive to be clean anymore, in fact even the most hardened hardware users (myself included) are often telling people to stop wasting their money on expensive kit when the preamps in their interface are more than good enough to make a release-ready recording. I have a tonne of preamps, and I pick which one to use specifically based on how they sound when overdrived - for anything which I'm DI'ing or just want clean, I still go straight into my RME or use a DAV or something.
It's all well and good telling people to go try things for themselves, but we all know full well that nobody is going to. The younger generation especially do practically zero fact checking, none of his viewers are going to buy a load of scopes and testing equipment and repeat the tests he's done, and he knows that.
In my opinion, it's no better than Joe Rogan spouting nonsense to a load of people who already desperately want to believe him, by just saying "you can go find these things out for yourself". He knows nobody will fact check anything, and that people will just blindly believe him.
All I ever want is for people to understand that every voice you hear on the internet (including my own) is just another opinion, a small flavour which you should listen to, consider, then decide for yourself whether to take it on board, research it further, or totally discount it. If more people did that, there wouldn't be so much back and forth pointless arguing and discourse.
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u/RedStr0be Jun 26 '26
I’m not getting involved in this, I’d just like to say I’m glad the online bickering about gear and what’s right and wrong is still going strong after all these years. I’ve always loved how this is a community where you will find no right or wrong answer on basically anything.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Ha, the same argument that somehow existed before digital recording and will certainly outlive us all.
I'm off to bicker about whether Ampex 456 or 499 give the warmer analogue sound.
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u/GreatScottCreates Professional Jun 26 '26
Except the bickering is the stupidest it’s ever been thanks to YouTube and TikTok. Good information isn’t rewarded- controversial information is rewarded.
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u/LunaticMosfet Jun 26 '26
I know the gear I have sounds great and better than most cheap stuff I've tried out
Have you done any tests in a controlled environment, or is it just a ballpark feeling from a simple A/B test? If not I’d recommend do some controlled tests to make sure. Double-blind testing is too strict, people can just do a casual preference test with matched levels from two different devices. Make sure it’s blind, meaning you don’t know which is which, and do it more than nine times.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
What I've done is run a kick drum through a cheap preamp and driven it hard, to find it a very harsh, unpleasant distortion.
I've then changed that kick to run through one of my APIs and driven it equally hard, and it's sounded amazing.
I do this most times I do a recording, I try different pre's and see what sounds best. You don't need an oscilloscope to do that.
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u/Sixstringsickness Jun 26 '26
I stopped bothering to comment on this subject because there are so many clueless individuals...
If they can't hear the obvious difference between an API or any other preamp, and cannot comprehend the difference between input and output attenuation and gain staging, there is no need for further conversation.
I'm absolutely baffled how people haven't observed the most basic concept of a sine wave into a preamp and evaluated the harmonic distortion characteristics and how they differ based on topology and input level (hence the benefit of output attenuation).
I hope these threads die.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Sadly, as long as YouTube monetisation exists I fear they'll go on forever
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u/Sixstringsickness Jun 26 '26
They will, as amazing of a tool as AI is, enabling users to expand their technical horizons - it also unfortunately offers a significant amount of confirmation bias if you don't tell it to be honest and critical. "All preamps are effectively the same these days aren't they?" "That is an incredible, insight, and you're right for most purposes even entry level preamps are fantastic tools." The more you press it with your personal opinions and beliefs and push back, the more it will comply depending on the level of sycophancy...
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u/Hungry_Horace Professional Jun 26 '26
I think it comes down to a philosophical preference.
You’re an engineer who likes to run things hot into pre-amps until they colour the sound, because you want that colour and want it in the recording.
In which case, what pre-amp you use WILL make a difference, and yes expensive analogue circuitry will probably give you a nice saturation or clipping effect. An RME pre amp won’t do that.
From what I can tell from these two videos, these guys don’t do that - they want a super clean recording and then to add effects afterwards itb.
In which case yes, most mid and above range preamps nowadays do the job in almost exactly the same way. We’ve come a LONG way from the early prosumer hardware of the 90s/2000s and, like with DA and AD converters have effectively passed beyond transparency. The preamps on my UFX III are ridiculously clean with a super low noise floor.
The important point in all this, which you’ve made somewhere in this thread, is that the price point of clean, high quality recording is now ridiculously low - a 300 quid Focusrite Scarlett sounds great. So for those starting out - hardware is not what is holding your sound back, it’s just experience.
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u/Chilton_Squid Jun 26 '26
Yes exactly, I completely agree. But none of that is mentioned in the video, it just says all preamps are the same and implies therefore, that anyone who has ever bought an expensive pre is a mug who's been taken for a ride.
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u/Front_Ad4514 Professional Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I’m just gonna ask this question: What records has he worked on to deserve the constant praise and renown that he gets? Does he have like…any credits at all?
Don’t get me wrong he’s a great teacher for beginners…but people talk about him like he’s CLA or Pensado or something when he would be MUCH more akin to a professor at Full Sail.
I know he frequents this sub…Dan if you see this, I don’t dislike you and i’m not trying to be a hater.
sometimes I just wonder why he was crowned the king of all things audio knowledge.
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u/fletch44 Jun 27 '26
What has that got to do with technical engineering knowledge and facts?
You sound salty.
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u/Jacques_Frost Jun 26 '26
The glorious bottom line is that tons of modern interfaces are now fitted with great pre-amps. That democratizes the recording of more wonderful music. I agree with everything Dan said about Jim Lill's video.