Rupert Neve Designs 5211

clean and huge sounding

Big wide sounding preamps with very little added hiss and uncanny headroom.

The silk (red ftw) is almost always on here, you just adjust the desired amount of saturation and off you go. It's possible to increase saturation by raising the gain levels and lowering the output fader.

The high pass filter is also incredibly clean and useful, this unit sounds so good that running loopback stereo Tracks through it, filtering and saturating a bit almost always brings the mids forward and adds a bit of sparkle to the source. Definitely suitable for the master buss on occasion.

The preamp seems to work magic with slower microphones, but may not be the best option for transformer-less units. Very useful unit altogether, especially if you're looking for something that can sound clean and modern too.