32 Channel Microphone Preamp

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A friend of mine as asked me to look into building him a Balanced Tube Microphone Preamp for his Digital Recording Studio (if I remember correctly he uses a DAC), and I am wondering how much of an undertaking this would be?
 
Don't you have any specification ?

Yeah you need that.. Here are some questions that I would ask, and I expect ruffrecords probably has many additional useful suggestions, but at a minimum I would ask:

  • Do you need (switchable) 48V phantom power?
  • Do you want input transformers, and if so what part of the budget can you allocate to their purchase?
  • What features are on the mixing board that you don't need to duplicate? (EQ, polarity inversion, etc?)
  • How much gain is required, and how do you want to control it?
  • What is the noise floor, typical and peak output levels of the microphones being used? (Gain requirement, noise floor and overload margins, any special supply or load impedance considerations?)
  • Do you need balanced output? (Since this is a tube pre, that probably means another transformer.)
  • Stick to commonly available tubes like the 12AX7, 12AT7 or go for something more exotic and hence expensive?
  • What sort of packaging/chassis format do you envision as being ideal? (4 ITU rack chassis with 8 independent channels sharing a supply for example or ?)
This sounds like a really, really big project to me..
 
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