Microphone preamplifiers are a fundamental building block in professional audio systems, with a legacy reaching back decades. Indeed, the microphone and preamplifier combination often define the signature sound of a recording. The preamplifier performance must exceed nearly everything else in the system, and as the first line of defense to the outside world it must withstand hostile conditions such as 48V phantom power faults or erroneously patched hot signals. Today’s preamplifier developers face many challenges as new products demand lower cost and digital control, components that have been depended on for years are discontinued, demands for quality either increase or (worse) are forgotten, and so on. Fortunately, today’s developers have more options than ever before to design cost effective, high-performance, sweet sounding preamplifiers. This tutorial provides a background on preamplifier design, in a step-by-step approach, that discusses a variety of circuit designs trade-offs between cost, size, power consumption, protection, low-noise design , distortion, common-mode-rejection and other factors.
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