September 11th, 2024- Gear Shootout

Today, I am going down into Studio E to test the difference between a few preamps. I come from a guitar background, but I wanted to experiment with this a bit so instead of testing on acoustic guitar, I’m testing on kick drum. I will use a Shure Beta 52 as my baseline mic and compare between 4 different Preamps.

Before starting this project, I did some research into which preamps I should test. Where a lot of insight for me came from were some old forum posts from gearspace.com. A couple of my preamp choices came from ideas here. Another article that I found helpful, especially in conjunction with the gearspace forum, was an article from pauseplayrepeat.com on the tones of different frequency ranges for kick drums.

With how I chose the preamps out of the way, here are the 4 that ended up going with. First was the Focusrite ISA 428. This one was chosen because it is very clean, not much going on with it. It gives a good baseline to go off of with a relatively flat frequency curve. I had a similar thought process in choosing the Daking Mic-Pre 4. It handles loud sounds and peaks very well which I thought would work well for drums. The next two were ones that were mentioned a few times in forums. The UA 4710d and the Neve Portico 5015. The UA, being a tube amp, I thought would be interesting as it gives a warmer sound than most other preamps. There was a similar thought process in choosing the Portico. One thing to note about the latter two preamps is the fact that they both have built in compressors. These were switched off for the sake of comparison but I do believe that this makes them excellent choices for drums as you can compress a little going in and add more later through external gear, giving an easier way of getting that parallel compression sound.

To start, the Focusrite was used to get that flat, clean sound. While it still was flat, it gave a lot more body to the sound than I was expecting. Next is the Daking. This one was also relatively flat sounding, like the Focusrite, but is just missing that boom that came with the Focusrite. The UA is next. As I expected, this one just gave a warmth to the sound that was very nice. It gave it that live kick drum feeling of being heart pounding. Lastly is the Portico. This one sounded like a combination of the warmth of the UA and the boom of the Focusrite.

My ranking for these preamps is as follows: In last place for me was the Daking. It was flat sounding, like I expected, but it didn’t give much more than that on kick drum. Next was the Focusrite. Also very flat sounding, but I did get a nice surprise with the amount of heaviness and boom that came with this one. In second place for me was the UA, the warm tone of the tube giving a nice live sound to it was great. The thump on this one lets you really feel every hit. In first place was the Portico. I was shocked by how good this sounds on kick drum. It takes all of the good parts of the other tested preamps and rolls them into one awesome kick sound. It has that warm, live feel of the UA as well as that boominess and punch that comes from the Focusrite. Out of all of them, this one was my favorite by far.