SB MP3+ or M-Audio for laptop

[Anthony]

Okay, I ordered the SoundBlaster MP3+ from the HP website and now it looks like it is backordered. So this got me thinking (always dangerous):

My goal is eventually to get a ECM8k mic, which needs phantom power. The only preamps that are readily available and "good" are pretty big and require external power. The phantom power supplies by themselves don't seem to work, since the voltage and impedence aren't at line level (i.e. to use with another sound card).

So, it looks like I need to spend another $50 to $75 on a preamp with phantom power to use the better microphone. Add that to the soundcard and I'm looking at $100 + microphone.

Now I can get the M-audio MobilePre, which has phantom power in the $125 to $140 range, which is more, but it's less cabling, no external power supply to lug around, and seems be pretty good quality.

My question is this:
If I'm going to get an ECM8000 mic, should I just cancel the MP3+ and get the MobilePre?

Followup: are there any pitfalls to using the MobilePre over the MP3+ soundcard with REW? I searched around a bit and did not find anything major.

Thanks for the help!

Anthony

[brucek]

Several members have been successful using the M-Audio. It's nice to be able to simply plug the mic directly into it.

The only caveat I remember is with creating the soundcard.cal file. There is no obvious unbalanced input to loop to the unbalanced output to create the file. I believe we solved that with feeding one unbalanced output to a channel of the balanced input and it was fine.

brucek