SE Electronics DM1

Well, it looks amazing, and is cheaper than a cloudlifter, so that's good.

If you need something inline to boost your mics, this will do the job, but in my experience, it picks up A LOT of noise. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the connection between the mic (Shure sm7b) and xlr never felt super tight, and this led to a lot of unwanted noise in my recordings.

Not all the time, mind you, but that's the problem. It is inconsistent. Sometimes it does the job exactly as it should, and the recordings are clean. Sometimes it picks up all kinds of noise, and these bleed into the recordings. It happens at random, and I've never been able to isolate what causes it.

SO, for this reason, I do not recommend this product. It just isn't consistent and clean enough.

I wound up replacing it with a triton fethed, and the difference is night and day. Connection is super tight, sound quality is amazing, and 100% clean. Pluse, the triton fethed is about 40eur cheaper, and about 25% smaller. So, I'd recommend going for the fethed for your gain needs!

After some research online I found this to be a very reasonably priced mic activator/ preamp which would allow me to use my SM7B and Ribbon mics to their full potential.. Thomann kindly stocked it and I placed my order. First impressions this is a very cool looking device. It comes in a small box that looks like a stick of dynamite stick so I'm surprised it made it through airport security :) It is connected directly to your microphone and uses 48v from your preamp to power. It delivers 28db of clean gain so you no longer have to crank your preamp when recording quieter sources.. It will not pass 48v on to your ribbon so it's completely safe to use with them.. I've also used it to join up long cable runs with great sucess. Would definitely recommend this to anyone who's looking for a cheaper alternative to cloudlifter / fethead and from the reviews I've watched online it performs better at a fraction of the price.. A++