HOW PREAMPS QUIETLY MAKE BIG GAINS-PART2
Many years ago my drummer’s parents threw a dinner party for the band, because they wanted to meet the scumbags who were leading their son into a life of sin. To ease the initial awkwardness I launched into the tragi-comic tale of one Olive Gherkin, a high-school chum of the mother of a friend of someone I knew. Young Olive had a headache in class, and excused herself to the school nurse, who quickly concluded Olive was having the sort of challenges that come to a girl on a regular basis. She supplied Olive with a bit of intimate apparel with strings to fix it in place, but the poor girl had never seen one before, and having a headache turned up back in class with the thing tied to her head.
Yes, I feel ashamed of myself now, but at that time tales of teenage humiliation seemed like fair game. Plus, she had a funny name. The anecdote went over about as well as you’d expect with the oldies, and in the lonesome cricket silence that followed I began to contemplate the value of subtlety and nuance – both sorely lacking in my anecdote — and how a blunt instrument just gives people a sore head.
Years later, when I was designing a microphone preamp, I likewise discovered that while making a signal louder by brute force is an easier tale to tell than the subtle and nuanced mystery of ‘good sound’, unless I wanted my customers to wear faces like I saw around that dinner table, I’d better deliver on the latter.
In Part 1 of this article (Issue 123), I suggested that a microphone amplifier requires the co-ordination and harmonisation of a whole range of concerns. In blunt instrument terms, it should provide:
• 40 to 70dB of gain for the audio signal.
• Rejection of
