Thanks for the reply. I've since purchased one and it is quite a fine little deck. Weighs 27 pounds and handles tape about as well as a Studer B67. Takes up to 12 inch reels and has IEC/NAB eq. Very crappy headphone amp and no mic inputs are the only downsides I could find.
Rich Brown
For having real mic inputs, you need phanton power, thus individual mic preamps are needed for your choise of quality.
The head amp is wonderful on my machine.
Testet with Beyerdynamic DT-880, Sennheiser 650 and the best of the three; Ergo 2.
Compared to what you get on the market of individual headphone preamps, none of them beats the headamp in the Lyrec up to ~$3.000-4.500.
Something must be wrong in your machine.
My machine passed the factory to get everything alligned, testet and standard.
I'm puzzled by your conviction here?
"dolph"