[bobwitte]

You do not NEED mic preamp, the mini has one built in. An improvement in sound quality is always possible whenever you upgrade items in the signal chain and as long as the items later in the chain are not limiting audio quality - Mic, preamp, A->D conversion.

Since you could spend thousands on a preamp compared the hundreds for an entire Mbox, the quality of the preamp could be improved by buying a decent pre. The same goes for the mic you are using and how clean/accurate the A->D converters are.

I am only familiar with high priced units. My son owns a Universal Audio 2-610, which of course is an awesome mic pre (2 channels), but I have not used it with any M-Boxes since we typically multitrack record live performances off of an Allen and Heath mixers direct outs into an Alesis HD24 and then import the audio into PT's for remixing.

Hope this helps.