Great River: MP2-MH microphone preamplifier

This is a great mic preamp. It's very quiet, has plenty of gain and does a great job of accurately reproducing what you feed it. It's a Class A, discrete, solid-state pre, and all the internal audio connectors are gold plated. There are two channels with XLR ins and outs on the rear panel and a 1/4'' high-impedance input of the front. I first tried it on an guitar amp with a clean sound from the guitar's neck pickup. It captured the singing Fender tone beautifully and gave it the perfect balance of warmth and brightness that that neck position sound needs. I used it with a Neumann U87 on a male vocal and had great results, especially since I had been having a hard time getting a good sound with this particular singer using other well-regarded pres. I also got great results with a pair of Coles 4038s as overheads on drums, a pair of TLM 103s on a piano, and an M260 on violin and acoustic guitar. Consistently, all of these sources sounded present, robust and natural. The MP2-MH has all the standard and necessary features on the front panel, including phase, 15 dB pad, and phantom power switches. The gain knob has detents which I thought was bizarre until I used it with a vocalist. We did a couple of takes with one setting and then decided to change compressors, and I needed to change the preamp setting. Eventually we decided to go back to the original chain and I was able to set the pre back to the exact same gain setting as a result of the detents. Our initial and final vocal sounds and levels matched perfectly. This opened my eyes to how important accurate recall during tracking can be, especially working on a project that's spread out over several sessions, and you're working on the project in a non-linear fashion. If you're looking for a pre that won't alter the sound you're trying to capture, I found this to be an excellent choice for nearly every combination of mic and instrument I tried it on. The only exception I found was heavily distorted guitars, but that's why you need to own the MP2-NV in addition to the MP2-MH. ($2299 MSRP, www.greatriverelectronics.com)