Triton Audio FetHead in-Line Microphone Preamp

Work as expected, but did not reduce in any way self-noise of my mic

I have an RE20 which needs a lot of gain to get a decent level. It's a mic that rejects external noise and just captures what's in front of it which is what I needed to record a YouTube video. Unfortunately, I was doing voiceover work and only had a Tascam field recorder on me. The Tascam is great but it has a lot of preamp noise compared to an audio interface, especially when using a dynamic mic and turning the gain up. I put the Fethead on the RE20 and immediately was able to cut my gain by more than half which cut out almost all the noise and left me with levels that were higher than when my gain was set at double what I had before.On an audio interface this isn't and really shouldn't be needed, even with a cheaper interface. In a recording environment with an audio interface a tool like this is only really good for situations where you have something like a ribbon mic that you want to protect from phantom power because the interface only lets you control phantom power for 2 preamps at a time or in a situation where you have a noisy interface preamp and want to turn down the gain to get rid of that (but that's really rare).I haven't compared it to the Cloudlifter yet but I'd say both are nice to have in a studio environment. Neither should color your sound in any way you can really hear. I'd say the Cloudlifter has the advantage of letting you daisy chain XLR cables together in cases where you need a longer cable but don't have one. As far as specs go, the Fethead has around 7dB more gain than the CL-1 but that's not going to be a dealbreaker for most people. I may update this review after trying out the Cloudlifter when it arrives but I fully expect they both work and behave the same and just have different form factors and a tiny difference in specs.

I have a simple recording setup where I have a dynamic microphone (SM57) connected to a USB audio interface on my PC (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2). It works just fine, but of course the pre-amps on that little interface are not as strong as those you would find on something like a stand-alone mixer. The result is that you have to turn up the gain on the pre-amp a lot to get a strong signal, and that also turns up the noise. Not ideal.One solution is to get a different kind of microphone, like a condenser, that uses phantom power. When I use such a mic with the audio interface the signal is very hot. I have to turn the pre-amps way down.This little Fethead is the other solution. You turn on the phantom power on the interface, which the dynamic mic doesn't require. The fethead then uses the phantom power to amplify the mic before the pre-amp. It's a pre-pre amp. This amplification happens before all the noise from the pre-amp comes into play, so noise stays low and your voice goes up. Now you can turn the pre-amps on the audio interface down low just like with a condenser mic.It's just one solution to a problem of many. Instead of getting this you could get a non-dynamic mic. You could get better pre-amps. You could get a different audio interface or mixer. It really depends on your situation if this is going to be the right answer. But if it is the answer you are looking for, it absolutely works.There are only two very minor negative things I can say about it. One kind of obvious thing is that it effectively makes your microphone longer. This almost never matters, but there are definitely situations where it could.The other is that while it won't amplify noise in your pre-amp it could amplify noise from the environment. Thanks to the fethead, I discovered that some LED lights I have were emitting sound at a particular frequency. Without the fethead, my microphone was not picking up that noise enough for it to show up on a recording. But with the fethead, suddenly I could see a straight horizontal line in the scope clear as day. Make sure you only use this in an environment without that kind of interference that could mess up your recording.