After mixing a thousand records or so, I can honestly say that the BIGGEST factor in getting a clear vocal is the acoustics of the room the vocals were recorded in. I can get around most other issues with a minimum of hassle and at least get to a decently good vocal. Crappy mic, I can get something that can still work on the radio. Crappy pre, same thing. Crappy mic placement, a bit more of a challenge, but I can massage it. But a bad room, I'm totally screwed and can only make minimal improvements. Usually the problem is too much ambience or the wrong kind of ambience. An extreme example, would be too much room ambience from a small bedroom. That will almost never sound good except in rare circumstances. It's funny because most people recording at home don't have the accuracy in their monitoring (either the monitors, or the room screwing with it, or just ambience noise in the room making it hard to hear things accurately) so they don't realize how much ambience is in their mic. So they might think it's fine when it's not. And then they don't take into account that their style of music might require a lot of compression on the vocal which is going to bring up the ambience even more.
So honestly, getting a clear vocal is more about where you record than any of the gear.
