Hi, I have an Amek Einstein desk and generally use its mic pre's for recording, I compared them to the mic pre of a TL Audio C1 but prefered the top end detail of the Amek. Other than that I have no experience of quality mic pre's so my question is this - How much money would I have to spend to significantly improve on the Ameks mic pre's, and what products should I look at? I run a commercial studio and my priority would be to capture the best vocal sound I can using a Neumann M147.
Thanks.

I found this one out about 2 months ago, as I purchases a Rode NTK.

The pre-amp I bought was a Rane DMS22, which sounds really good for the cash. (I paid $400, which is pretty much the bottom price of a higher end pre-amp)

I would say just go to the store, take your mic with you and start experimenting. A dedicated preamp for a quality microphone is well worth the money spent.

The more crap you have between you and the mic, the more erroneous signal noise you will get. I don’t care if you are using a $1000000 mixer and a $100000 microphone and a $100000 preamp. The more crap, the more crappie the sound will be. If you don’t like the preamps that are on your mixer then you ether have a crappie mixer or something in the line is crappie. Try other mics, other fx, other rack gear, other cables, and if all else fails, get a mixer that has good preamps and sounds the way you want it to sound. I had a O2RV2 and ran it into a Mackie 24/96. I recorded about 18-20 full CD projects and hated every one. I bought new expensive mics, preamps, etc and spent thousands trying to get them to sound great, and I never could. One day I just sold it all and bought the Roland VS2000CD for $1400. I record with a hand full of budget mics, and all my projects sound Awesome! And I don’t own a preamp!