Our PreSonus DigiMax 48k
When we find gear that just works, we tend to stick with it for the long haul here at CenterStage. One key piece of equipment in our remote recording rig that fits this description beautifully is the PreSonus DigiMax mic preamp. We have four of them in our road rack case that give us 32 channels of Class A preamplification at our disposal. We’ve had these mic pre’s for over ten years and they have never let us down ever! Of course, these units were hand assembled in Louisiana by the folks at PreSonus. We’re fairly certain that has been a key factor in these boxes’ durability. Unfortunately, they were discontinued many years ago, so we are very happy to have the four pre’s we currently own.
One of the nifty features of these models is eight channels of onboard limiting. Traditionally, most engineers avoid using limiters during tracking because they tend to squash the wave form, similar to a clipped signal, instead of merely attenuating the wave’s amplitude. However, the limiters in these units also include RMS detection, very similar to the mechanism used in most compressors. In our experience with these fine mic pre’s, we have found the trick to getting mild compression without incurring the adverse effects from peak limiting is to just barely tickle the limiters during live tracking.
After reading the above, most people would ask the following: “If you’re recording with 24-bit word lengths, why take the risk of clipping when there’s more than sufficient bit depth to ‘gain up’ during post? Why not just peak with plenty of headroom to spare?”
While we acknowledge this is common practice in the industry, we believe saturating the AD (analog-to-digital) converters with maximum signal renders the most accurate conversion, yielding increased spatial presence and depth. And the end result is we walk away from a live show with the components that enable us to mixdown a very high quality live recording.
If you haven’t already heard a sample of our live audio, be sure to check out a sample high quality MP3 located near the bottom of this page that we believe recreates beautifully the spatial characteristics of the airport hangar in which this show was originally tracked.
Of course the real trick to pulling this off is to be very familiar with the source material you’re tracking and to have the band fully on board with this style of recording by consciously controlling their onstage dynamics while performing. So it takes a joint effort. But when everyone is on the same page, the results are extraordinary.