I do not trust alto gear very much. I had a friend who worked for their french distributors and he told his share of horror stories about alto gear.
You cannot expect an entry level tube pre to sound like a neve preamp. If you want a very clean preamp, I'd stay away fom tubes in this price range. The only cool thing about all those cheap tube pres (Art, Behringer, Presonus, Dbx...) is that they color the sound. So if that's what you're after go for it. If you're looking for a transparent souding pre, go solid state.
what do you think about the sm pro audio SM PR4. Is it any good?
Oh, probably I should mention my other equipment. I have a Behringer B-2 pro. The Preamps I recorded with were in my Berhinger MX1604a. So it should have a better Quality than these preamps.
well the problem is that the preamps broke down and it would cost at least 100$ to fix them. So I thought I just buy a seperate preamp in that pricerange. But it should have at least the quality of these preamps maybe i little bit more noise than the behringer ones.