I enjoyed the casual frankness of the Royer Labs page that Dave linked too:
http://www.royerlabs.com/preampconsiderations.html A ribbon mic should work very well in either the OctaCapture 5kohm inputs or the 10kOhm inputs.
If it does not work well... blame it on the mic, and don't expect it to work any better in some other input impedance choice.
Ribbon mics were around for nearly a century, sounding great, before someone figured out they could sell people who didn't have much experience with ribbon mics on the idea that ribbon mic technology requires extra accessories and a special ribbon mic preamp.
Any input between 1.5kOhm to 20kOhm should work real good. If you go below 1.5kOhm you can anticipate that, at some low value, an effect of high frequency attenuation will occur and the sound will seem dull.
I think the whole ribbon accessory business is based on the tendency of people to search for technological solutions to augment sub par performance. If you can shove some vibrant music towards a ribbon mic, most will do a great job of transducing it into the recorder for you. You don't really need anything else... and the extra stuff isn't going to help if you can't get it right before the sound tickles the ribbon.
That stuff in the description is just add copy drivel... they think it makes them look smart, but it is a dumb marketing trick that makes otherwise smart customers feel dumb when the vendors chooses to slather make believe on the sales pitch.
More often than not, customers are turned off when they are left confused and it is another example of how opting for caveman marketing rather than treating a customer with the kind of respect that fosters a long term business relationship can forestall sales.
The best way to present the 8 inputs on the Octa Capture is much simpler than the current practice of confusing people with make believe. I'd suggest that a simple statement like,
"8 great sounding mic inputs" could get the job done and leave customers with an optimism and eagerness to give the unit a try.
But Noooooooooooooooooo... someone just had to show off that they went to tech school and learned some misinformation about ribbon mics and that they couldn't resist including make-believe-speak in the ad copy.
I think it makes the effort to promote what appears to be a very nice piece of hardware seem cheezy and amateurish.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll sell a whole bunch of them to people who plan on buying a ribbon mic some day.
Roland just vaporized 6.8% of it's common stock in an effort to make it appear that it's stock value has stabilized.
http://www.roland.com/ir/pdf/news/20130322.pdf Roland has this wonderful little hard ware unit called the OctaCapture, but no one seems to know how to sell it because some one thinks we are all a bunch of dummies. Good luck Roland.
best regards,
mike
post edited by mike_mccue - 2013/03/31 09:28:08