ART Dual Pre USB

A Dual channel XLR interface with a battery compartment, external power in, AND It works alone? What more could you want? Perhaps a little more space - the back panel is very cramped.

It works wonderfully as a pre-amp. Interface wise, it's only 16/48kHz, but has 0.4ms latency at 44.1kHz, so it's pretty good for your standard user. Minijack headphone socket, two TRS outputs, with mix and level control, but all connected.

The ART Dual Pre USB is great for a two channel stand along pre-amp and recording interface, but Appication-wise it's a little limited - it's only really useful if you either NEED a two channel pre-amp (like I did for a systems installation), as there are other two-channel recording interfaces that are much better value for money. Make no mistake, though, it's a wonderful bit of kit, just not nessecarily first choice.

This is the only pre-amp I've owned. I use it to record Children singing in choir settings in classrooms. My mobile studio is a low budget set-up run completely on battery power. My condenser microphones require phantom power and the 48 vt. preamps on the Zoom R8 are simply unusable in my experience. This is my solution and it does the trick. The ART Dual Pre USB powers two matched microphones via 9 volt battery. The gain knobs are a bit tricky in that there is a point at which the gain seems to have an exponential increase, but that causes no problems for my purposes. For mobile/field recording this is very useful piece of equipment.