check this bass recording chain, got some problems

[cordura21]

I am recording a jazz bass, and I can't get it right. Check the attachment , which contains a picture of the bass wave.

The chain is the following:

strings ;

Seymour Duncan active pickups;

passive circuit, using just the bridge volume pot up, the other down, and the tone pot fully open;

Excalibur cable;

Digi 001 pres, input 2;

digital track.

So as you can see in the attachment , I have two problems:
1) I can't get a very hot signal without some distortion:
I wonder if this is because maybe the pickups are too close to the strings, or if there is an impedance mismatch between the active pickups and the pre.

2) The wave doesn't look symetrical(sp?)
I don't know if this is actually a problem, but I always thought the they have to be similar both in positive and in negative land.
I did a DC offset removal just in case but nothing seemed to change.

I am tracking at 24 bits so I don't have much headroom problems, but I would like to improve it.


TIA for you help. Cheers, Andrés