Sounds like you're in the third stage of learning about home recording:
Stage 1: What stuff do I need?
Stage 2: How do I work this stuff?
Stage 3: Why are my recordings so quiet?
As a first guess, I suspect that you're trying to get your recordings to be as loud a the commercial CDs you're comparing. This is a totally common issue, made worse by lots of bad advice on the internet regarding level setting.
The thing to understand is that the commercial tracks were not that loud when they were recorded. The level was raised in both the mixing and mastering steps. For optimum audio quality, it's very useful to aim for average levels between -18 dBFS and -24 dBFS, with peaks not to exceed -6 to -8 dBFS. This is roughly the same as the old 0 dBVU from analog tape days, and the optimum level for all our analog stages.
Your idea that a different preamp would allow you to use less gain misses the meaning of gain. The level of your recording is determined by the source loudness as measured at the mic + overall system sensitivity. Overall system sensitivity is the sum (sorta) of mic sensitivity, preamp gain, preamp output level, and a/d input sensitivity. So it doesn't matter what mic pre you use, it will have to deliver the same gain to reach the same level if the other factors remain the same.
Perhaps you're looking for a quieter preamp section than the one in your Fastrack pro. This is _possible_ but in my experience unlikely. The performance of very inexpensive chip based preamps is amazingly high these days and in nearly all home recording situations the preamp noise is much much lower than and totally swamped by the ambient noise in the room.
Fran
|