

If you look beyond the RNP8380's utilitarian ugliness, you'll see that we opted to throw the money saved in cosmetics into the quality of the audio electronics. Now, more than ever, what you put into a mic pre is what you'll get out. Even though there are many mic pres that are quieter, there are very few that have the spurious-free (i.e., distortion-free) spectrum of the RNP8380. At this point, I won't bore you with the geeky details, but I want to assure you that fidelity was not sacrificed in the RNP8380. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of integrated-circuit (IC) based mic pres in recent years, one of the typical casualties has been fidelity.

When designing a pre-amp, there are many ways to balance the sometimes conflicting operating constraints. FMR decided to do the latter: at unity gain, the RNP 8380 has a clip point of +27.5dBu (almost 25Volts peak-to-peak)! Even with a hefty microphone output, the RNP8380 should take what your mics have to give. This means either employing a front-end pad and/or increasing the headroom of a mic pre. These days, the trend is for microphones to increase their output signal levels while reducing their output noise levels. The Really Nice Pre-amp, the RNP, is a 1/3 rack two channel mic pre-amp.
