Getting started

RNPQuickstartV050 Page 1 of 10
I NTRODUCTION
Typically, this is where I’m supposed to congratulate you on your choice of buying our Really Nice
Preamp, but I’m not going to! I do, however, want to THANK YOU! We appreciate putting your trust and
hard-earned cash into one of our products (or at least giving us a shot by demoing them)! Even though
we’re very proud of our products, the point of it is to give you the opportunity to make music without
excessively draining your bank account nor making excuses for the sonic results!
Really Nice Preamp
What’s Cool!
Before you scurry off to work on your studio tan (although if you’re in a real hurry, see See “Quickstart” on
page 4. ), I did want to point out to you some of the salient points about the Really Nice Preamp:
• Lots’o’headroom — These days, the trend is for microphones to increase their
output signal levels while reducing their output noise levels. This means either
employing a front-end pad and/or increasing the headroom of a micpre. We
decided to do the latter: at unity gain, the RNP 8380 has a clip point of +28dBu
(over 27 Volts peak-to-peak)! Even with a hefty microphone output, the RNP8380
should take what your mics have to give!
•
Fidelity — As simple as the function of micpre is, most design engineers would
probably agree that it’s not one of the easier devices to design properly. There are
many ways to balance the sometimes conflicting design constraints. Unfortu-
nately, with the proliferation of integrated-circuit (IC) based micpres in recent
years, one of the typical casualties has been fidelity. 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. Even though there are many micpres that are quieter, there are very
few that have the spurious-free (i.e., distortion-free) spectrum of the RNP8380
(Okay, that was a geeky detail...)! Now, more than ever, what you put into a
micpre is what you’ll get out!
• Ugly box — If you look beyond the RNP8380’s utiliterian ugliness, you’ll see that
we opted to throw the money we saved in cosmetics into the quality of the audio
electronics. I like having nice-looking gear as much as the next guy, but given the
choice between something that sounds nice versus looks nice, the sound wins out
every time!
• Really Nice Compressor (RNC) inserts — Each channel on the RNP8380 has an
unbalanced send/receive jack that allow you to connect an RNC1773 using a sin-
gle Tip-Ring-Sleeve (TRS) cable (per channel). Also, with proper cabling, you
could use this feature to balance any other unbalanced piece of gear. In addition,
with the right external configuration, the RNP can provide a separate +22dBu