Hi all,
I had posted this on an old thread, so apologies for the double up. I may also have been a bit tired from spend an entire day trying to track down this distortion, and thus a bit sharp.
Firstly, to eliminate the obvious suggestions, no, this is not a gain-staging problem in my set up. I have been recording since '93. I am well aware of clipping, and it’s causes.
The unit is less than a year old, and has had very minimal home use.
Set up:
Macbook M4 Pro 14 Tahoe 26.2
CQ-12T firmware 1.2.2 r4248
The problem: If I set the headphones source as “Listen” there is a distortion which mimics an overload/clip on some notes in a passage.
The “solution”, changing the source to “1/2” and the clipping goes away.
The clipping is not in the DAW (Logic Pro, Mixbus 12, Garageband) , as plugging headphones straight into the macbook, there is no clipping.
It seems to be purely in the code for the “Listen” source.
I say it “seems” as the physical output is working perfectly when sourced from “1/2”, so it’s not a problem with the hardware.
My headhones are brand new audio-technika, the macbook 3 months old. Music is clean midi files, and yes, I spent hours making sure it wasn’t in the velocity settings, or the virtual instruments.
Any help appreciated.
thanks
A
Edit: I think I worked it out. I didn’t see that the return from the macbook is actually being treated not as a monitoring source automatically, but as two tracks of audio like a instrument. Why this does this is beyond me, as it is clearly in interface mode, so who would want that?
So tracks one and two, which is what it uses as the returns for the interface, had a “quick setting” exp[ecting that it was drums coming through. In the configuration I have set this to line.
I have owned and own atleast a 6 interfaces, and i have never seen the return treated as an audio input.
I can’t concieve of a reason anyone would want this, as the entire point of the return it to monitor the DAW, but instead it is allowed to have audio treatments, like compressors etc, eq.
The system should not be doing this. It should default automatically to tracks one and two being line level and should “grey out” and overide any ability to put any treatments on it.