I have a Hal preamp which is the flagship pre in '98. It's no longer made. It's a dead quiet preamp with excellent build quality, great controls (remote). It's somewhat warm sounding and an excellent buy if you can find one. It has one quirky feature which I'm not sure the Cursa has - that's that they use XLR connectors for the preamp outputs. This is good in that you get a better connection, but perhaps a little inconvenient in that you have to have your IC's terminated with XLR on one end.
