A
anagriff
New member
Greetings all,
I use an eMac equipped with a Presonus Firepod, primarily to record voice and piano for making teaching CDs at a music school. The microphones I use are one MXL990 and one Behringer B-5. My knowledge of decibels, levels etc is still rudimentary.
The Firepod has 8 analogue inputs, the first 2 for mic/instrument, and the others for mic/line. Normally, any line source should be routed into the mic/line (inputs 3-8), not 1 or 2. All works well, but when I record from a line source (a minidisc or in this case a Sony cassette deck TC-WR665S) I need to crank the preamp knob up to at least 4 o'clock to get a decent spike on Cubase, and this is with the main gain slider for Cubase (F3 knob) fully up. In other words, nearly full gain all round to get a good spike without clipping. I would have thought a line signal from a tape recorder would be good and strong, but it's the same for both minidisc and cassette deck. Do any of you other Firepod users experience this, too? If not any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong? There isn't any appreaciable background noise, but I just don't like working at full strength, it brings back associations to the 1970's when cranking up a tape recorder gain more than half way introduced one huge hiss. Once I routed the line from the minidisc into the 1/2 mic/instrument preamp, and carefully cranked up the preamp. I got a good level, no clipping, at about 11 o'clock already. The preamps on the Firepod inputs are max 54dB apparently.
There was a previous thread on a related topic, but with a microphone (http://homerecording.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=145444).
Should I just forget it and happily record away regardless of knob position, as I said there doesn't seem to be any hiss and the end result seems fine, or should I regard this as an "issue"? Incidentally, when recording condensor mic of a solo singer unaccompanied, the gain is also up around 2-3 o'clock, which also seems a little high, but at least the signal as seen on the cubase screen is much stronger than the line.
Grateful for any help,
Dave
I use an eMac equipped with a Presonus Firepod, primarily to record voice and piano for making teaching CDs at a music school. The microphones I use are one MXL990 and one Behringer B-5. My knowledge of decibels, levels etc is still rudimentary.
The Firepod has 8 analogue inputs, the first 2 for mic/instrument, and the others for mic/line. Normally, any line source should be routed into the mic/line (inputs 3-8), not 1 or 2. All works well, but when I record from a line source (a minidisc or in this case a Sony cassette deck TC-WR665S) I need to crank the preamp knob up to at least 4 o'clock to get a decent spike on Cubase, and this is with the main gain slider for Cubase (F3 knob) fully up. In other words, nearly full gain all round to get a good spike without clipping. I would have thought a line signal from a tape recorder would be good and strong, but it's the same for both minidisc and cassette deck. Do any of you other Firepod users experience this, too? If not any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong? There isn't any appreaciable background noise, but I just don't like working at full strength, it brings back associations to the 1970's when cranking up a tape recorder gain more than half way introduced one huge hiss. Once I routed the line from the minidisc into the 1/2 mic/instrument preamp, and carefully cranked up the preamp. I got a good level, no clipping, at about 11 o'clock already. The preamps on the Firepod inputs are max 54dB apparently.
There was a previous thread on a related topic, but with a microphone (http://homerecording.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=145444).
Should I just forget it and happily record away regardless of knob position, as I said there doesn't seem to be any hiss and the end result seems fine, or should I regard this as an "issue"? Incidentally, when recording condensor mic of a solo singer unaccompanied, the gain is also up around 2-3 o'clock, which also seems a little high, but at least the signal as seen on the cubase screen is much stronger than the line.
Grateful for any help,
Dave