Personally I approach pres as 'soft' or 'hard',
I have a bunch of 'vintage' tube & transistor stuff.
Obviously the tube pres sound more 'soft'..
I find that if you have a choice between pres and start to know that 'character' / behavior of each - you start to get an idea of what works better for different applications, or simply what YOU feel like doing at that moment....
Of course 'better' is a subjective thing..
Plus sometimes you get bored of one pre and want to try another just to amuse yourself & get a different vibe.
I find 'hard' sounds like drums, guitar amps etc benefit from a 'soft' pre which helps smooth the sound - on the other hand maybe you want a harder sound, it just depends..I just switched to using a transistor pre / SM57 on guitar amps with a current project cuz I wanted a harder, more present sound instead of the 'puff' I was getting with tube pres / ribbon mics.
Both ways sounded good just different flavas.
FWIW I always use a transistor pre on kick drum, the tube pres I have just seem to be too soft and 'puffy' for kick..
Note - plenty GREAT music was recorded with only ONE type of pre on hand if you think of old boards like Neve, Trident, EMI, API, Universal Audio etc etc back in the day before we had all this outboard stuff..
If you had even one or two high quality preamp channels - this will likely raise the technical quality of your recorded sound a notch as compared to a board like Mackie etc or DAW inputs..
