Brian,

just a few things...

Adding dbx 286A to the signal path of the AKG 3000 gave me a quit a bit more control over the signal. It has a mic preamp with phantom power, a high pass filter, a compressor, a de-esser, an enhancer, and an expander/gate.

The set up I had was not a noisy one (the signal path was AKG 3000 -> dbx 286A -> Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro -> YAMAHA SW1000XG) but the noise was not zero either. Behringer denoiser improved S/N significantly. It has two denoisers (more like noise masks). I inserted one between the preamp and the compressor in dbx 286A and the other at the insert point of Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro.

Also, if you are going for a PC set up, make sure you don't connect any slow drives like zip's to the same IDE connector to which the hard disk, onto which you dump .wav files, is connected. Doing so may degrade the perfomance really badly.

BTW, AKG C3000 seems to have been the choice for almost everybody. If I remeber correctly AKG redesigned C3000 and it is now C3000B.

What I like about out board gear is the ease of control in real time. What I like about on-board hardware and software is the ability to save almost every setting in your project file.

Happy New Year and Happy Recording!

Shiral