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No way do Scarlett pres have the amount of clean gain we're talking for SM7B or RE20 territory. Unless you really get an excellent interface/mixer I would go for external pres.

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To be clear, this isn't just an opinion thing--the math is in 'eon1's favor. Scarlett's preamps can boost around ~55dB and a SM7B is something like -80dB with a normal speaking voice. Boosting that to -25dB will be audible, but it's not enough for most purposes and maxing out the preamp will generate some hiss.

The larger, non-bus-powered Scarlett interfaces provide perfectly good results with the SM7B.

http://recordinghacks.com/2012/06/18/sm7b-audio-interface-sh...

Even their 8i6 only boosts about 60dB, though. You can work with that, but that's a little low. I shoot for -14dB to -10dB for spoken stuff, and at that point you'd basically be eating the mic.

The article you linked was using a Cloudlifter with the SM7B, which is a preamp on its own.

I'm looking at the scarlet 18i8, I want four mic pres and will try with the 4-channel cloudlifter. 25db from the CL and another 25 from the interface ought to sound alright

Yeah, that should be completely fine. Presonus has a 8-channel preamp that's about the same price as the 4-channel Cloudlifter, too, btw.

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