What nuance? I quoted his post, he wasn’t sure of the terminology to be used in communicating his desired action, and I provided a course of action that would give him the desired/possible result. I didn’t go into the minutiae of the fact that this will only add any available character that the new preamp might impart on the already recorded material(although I mentioned it). In no way will it remove the existing character, just add to it. That may, or may not, be a good thing. It’s a similar concept to doing a mixdown “out of the box”(aka Analogue Summing), similar in the way my Soundcraft mixer interface is set up to do…route your tracks/busses to mixer channels, mix and eq manually on the analog section of the board in real time, route the mixer main channels to a stereo track and record it. This allows for the use of other analog outboard, via aux sends, to add color etc. In my system, I don’t hit the preamps on the mixer with the digital signal from the DAW in this scenario. It is inserted at line level at the converters, post preamp, pre eq.
So how is your answer any different from this?…
I know…I took for granted that the only way to route his new external 500 series rack preamp to his computer properly is through one of the line level inputs on his interface.


:dood:
All of this doesn’t really make much difference in the end, probably. As the track line level signal should probably be padded down, like with a 24-30dB in-line pad, or by sending to the line out of the interface from the track in the DAW ”post fader”, and attenuating to taste with the DAW track fader. This would allow the external preamp some headroom to work any available magic. Still, it’s not going to eliminate the original, actual, capture characteristics. It will let him get a bit of a feel of his new toy though.
Anyway, he’s not actually re-amping(where he would need to step down a line level recording output to match the impedance requirement of an amplifier instrument input). He’s adding another 2 trips through the ad/da converters to experiment with adding another gain stage…and any noise that is introduced in the process, for better or worse.