Soundcraft Spirit Folio Lite quality?

[dai h.]

I can't tell which is which at all.

[dai h.]

So when it comes to mic preamps, I look for the characteristics described in the famous Russell O. Hamm paper on tubes vs. transistors. IMO, an overload characteristic musical enough to be used for compression (which is what the paper describes) is the only thing worth paying extra for in a mic pre. And maybe low noise too, I guess.

And it's not like a Folio Lite will have a better overload characteristic than a Portastudio. All of these things share the same mic pre design, which is basically an op-amp with a long-tailed transistor pair strapped onto the front of it. So they all clip hard and have no duty cycle modulation, which makes them no good for compression, judged by the standards of the Hamm paper.

how about the Joemeek stuff? The designer (Ted Fletcher) talks about headroom (being good), transients (momentary ones causing bad distortion if there isn't enough headroom--hmmm...maybe the signals that I don't hear as pleasing have a lot of transients?), some stuff like that. Would the joemeek circuit designs be more likely to sound the way I want? Those seem to show up used around an affordable USD200 (more or less). Maybe I should just try to put together a simple tube stage.

[Brian H.]

I must be doing something right.

My kid just came home from band practice, and handed me a Spirit foliolite that the guitar player has given us. I'll see what's all not working.

[dai h.]

wow old thread, lol. FWIW (although I think I got excited with my purchase and wrote about it on another thread if memory serves) I bought a used joemeek vc3Q which (to my ear) sounds really good (doesn't sound bad?). It passes my test of sounding okay (clean and boring like a simple tube triode stage) with just plugging in a gtr. The compression has a pleasing effect and I like the EQ also.

Later, I found a used old Yamaha mixer around the same price as a used Behringer or Yamaha, etc. small mixer would be (though it was probably pricey when it first came out 30-ish years ago). It's got 6 channels, transformer inputs for ea. channel plus input attenuation made up of discrete resistors, individual PCB for ea. ch., transformer coupled main output. Seems pretty good sounding. Lots of headroom (bit higher than usual supply for ICs). EQ; not so sure if it's good (EQ can be bypassed by changing links internally). Some scratchy pots. No indiv. outs for ea. ch. unless modded. Bulky.

Also (possibly in part due to the current economic situation) found some used input transformers (priced affordably) to goof around with. One of them was an apparently quite old (late 60s or so) Tamura (apparently supplied to Teac) 150ohm to 60k with (what looks like) an internally terminated secondary (with an R). Tried that with a beat up SM58 (150ohms out) into ch.3 or 4 of my Tascam 488mkII (input Z listed as 150k but seems to be 100k since that (R) is what is across the input, plus on a similar Tascam model with apparently similarly configured input the input Z was listed as 100k) and it worked well to give me some "free" gain. I liked the way it sounded.

Also did some more modding of my Tascam 488mkII mixer section with some (surplus sourced) temp. compensating ceramics (measured) plus some slight extra bypassing on some of the opamp pins (with SMT temp.compensating 2n2 ceramics) and finally perceived a difference between a ch. modded with (conventionally, or ostensibly) "higher quality" caps and metal film Rs and the (less modded) next ch. Can't say if it's better (the extra brilliance might be worse depending on the situation or might be flattering reality more than a true reflection) but did seem more obviously different. Read stuff at various sources on the web how tight matching was better for differential circuits(as the ch.1,2 inputs seem to be in the Tascam). Planning on experimenting with that, matching some Rs and Cs as tight as I can just to check out what that does(or doesn't) do though I'm not expecting a fundamental change.