Grace Design m501 500 Series Microphone Preamp Reviews
Check out the m501 - Grace Design's first-ever 500 series module. Packaged into this convenient 500 series format, the m501 actually is actually a version of Grace Design's popular m101 preamp. It will fit inside any 500 Series module, which it requires in order to operate. This fully balanced, transformerless module features a 12-position rotary gain switch, hi-Z input switching, and a ribbon microphone mode that deactivates the onboard phantom power. A highpass filter and a trim pot are also onboard the Grace Design m501.
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Highest Rated Reviews
Still My Favorite
I bought my first Grace m501 about seven or eight years ago, and I recently bought a second one for the purpose of stereo mic'ing. I couldn't be happier with these. This is still my absolute favorite 500 series preamp. I own other preamps: Shadow Hills Mono Gama, Great River MP500NV, Cranborne Camden 500, and Focusrite Platinum. The Grace Design is by far my favorite! It's clean, clean, clean. . . . . I love clean! I can color the sound on the back-end if I want to, but I want a pristine, uncolored sound on the printed track. To me that's the most important starting point. From there, EQ, distort, compress, overdrive, whatever. This is my "go to" preamp for everything, and I wish I had about six more of them!
My new favorite pre
This is my new favorite pre! I have many high end pres from the likes of UA, Neve, RME, Blue, and Focusrite.
This has become my go to pre for tracking, due to its transparency in capturing any source( especially vox and steel string guitar). Sometimes Vanilla is what you want....Simple excellence.
Sound Purity, With Grace
I say "purity" because this is the most transparent, true-to-the-source preamp I've ever worked with. If you're looking for your pre to add "color" -- look somewhere else. If you have your mic placement down and love the sound of whatever you're recording as-is, this is the pre to use.
Major League CLEAN Gain
I, like every other recording engineer, enjoy a little "color" in my tracks, but sometimes I like to do the coloring myself, and not have to be at the mercy of the pre-amp. This 500 series pre is so clean, so incredibly transparent, that you'll truly believe you're in the room with the instrument. It really is like a wire with gain. That's all that needs to be said. No character, no color, no noise, nothing but perfect amplification. I can't believe I'm the first person to write a review on this. Maybe all the other owners haven't stopped playing with it long enough to put fingers to keyboard, huh? i would have given it 5 stars if there was some type of gain meter on the panel. It does have a single led that illuminates green when signal is passing through, and turns red when it's overdriven, but it would be nice to see the output metered in segments. This is definitely worth what I paid for it, and actually a bit more. You'll love it, I promise.
