Designing a Rack Mount Preamp with Colour Pt. 2 (Video) December 7, 2018 17:54

Back in April when I announced that I was working on rack mount mic preamp kit, I was unsure of the direction to take. So I posed the question to you, the DIY community: should I design a 2-channel preamp with more features, or a 4-channel with fewer features?

Your answers was resoundingly in favor of the 2-channel version. So I went back to the bench full of clarity and purpose to prototype features and lay out the circuit boards. Today I'm excited to show you my progress so far and ask you for some final bits of feedback before I finalize the circuit and front panel.

The rough front panel layout (click to expand)

As you can see in the rough front panel layout above, our rack mount unit has grown to be much more than just a stereo mic preamp. In fact, with the line input option, it's more like our CP5 Mic Preamp and Colour Palette combined, with a couple extra features.

So what do you think of the feature set?

Is there anything you'd absolutely love to see that I haven't included?

Is there anything I've included that seems superfluous?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!