Quality Issues

[SpeedSound]

Well First Im Using Cubase and a M-Audio Firewire 410 as my soundcard. When I play my keyboard (mo6) with out recording, Quality Sounds beautiful. But when I record my quality drops, Its not horrible but its a difference. My audio isnt clipping while playing or recording.....Any ideas?

 

[RAK]

Well First Im Using Cubase and a M-Audio Firewire 410 as my soundcard. When I play my keyboard (mo6) with out recording, Quality Sounds beautiful. But when I record my quality drops, Its not horrible but its a difference. My audio isnt clipping while playing or recording.....Any ideas?

How is everything connected? That will help to diagonose the problem.

 

[SpeedSound]

How is everything connected? That will help to diagonose the problem.

Yamaha Mo 6 > FireWire 410 > PC

Using 1/4 cables

 

[Jamz0r]

Is there any chance you are input monitoring with some sort of effects that are not being recorded?

 

[SonicAlbert]

Yeah, it sounds like somehow the audio path is different from when you are listening to it to when you are recording it and then listening back to it.

 

[RawDepth]

Well First Im Using Cubase and a M-Audio Firewire 410 as my soundcard. When I play my keyboard (mo6) with out recording, Quality Sounds beautiful. But when I record my quality drops, Its not horrible but its a difference. My audio isnt clipping while playing or recording.....Any ideas?

I am not familiar with Cubase and the 410 but, can't you increase the sampling rate and/or bit depth in Cubase? This should improve recording quality. (You will have to increase it on the Firewire 410 as well to match.)

My best guess.

RawDepth

 

[RAK]

Yamaha Mo 6 > FireWire 410 > PC

Using 1/4 cables

Is your monitoring setup the same for tracking versus playback?

 

[SpeedSound]

I am not familiar with Cubase and the 410 but, can't you increase the sampling rate and/or bit depth in Cubase? This should improve recording quality. (You will have to increase it on the Firewire 410 as well to match.)

My best guess.

RawDepth

I think so, But my sample rateis 44100hz? Should it be anydifferent?

 

[SonicAlbert]

That shouldn't make such a noticable difference.

When you listen to your synth while you ar *not* recording it, is it still patched through your sound card and software, or are you patching it directly to your monitors?

 

[TexRoadkill]

Is your playback volume lower then your record monitoring volume?

 

[SpeedSound]

That shouldn't make such a noticable difference.

When you listen to your synth while you ar *not* recording it, is it still patched through your sound card and software, or are you patching it directly to your monitors?

Its still patched into my Soundcard, my monitors are also in my soundcard

 

[SonicAlbert]

Its still patched into my Soundcard, my monitors are also in my soundcard

Then it should sound identical before and after recording.

Maybe you have a phasing problem. This can easily be caused if the signal is doubling back on itself somehow. Not a feedback loop, but where the synth is basically playing back over itself.

Like if you have a midi track that is playing the synth, and then you record that track as audio, but still have the midi track playing. Or if you have a monitor track and then record audio onto another track but still have the monitor track playing. There's a number of ways it can happen.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Its still patched into my Soundcard, my monitors are also in my soundcard

Then it should sound identical before and after recording.

Al, I'm not sure about this as it specifically relates to the 410, but isn't there a chance of a couple of drastic differences in signal path here?

First, if he's recording the synth analog, is it possible that during recording he's monitoring the signal on the way in *before* it hits his converters, whereas the playback is being monitored after going through a pair of conversions (A/D on the way in and D/A on the way out)?

Second, if he's recording MIDI, is there a chance that he's listening to two different MIDI DSPs; e.g. if the 410 has it's own DSP that's doing the translating on inbound monitoring, but a standard soundcard is doing the translation on playback? This would be dependant upon his having two soundcards and also having Cubase set to route that way, both ov which I'm admittedly unsure of.

You are probably far better versed in this stuff than I am (I'm not very strong in the 410, MIDI, or in recent versions of Cubase), so I'd be interested in hearing if I am way off target here or not.

G.

 

[SonicAlbert]

He seems to be monitoring at all times through his soundcard, which is why I think it's possible there is some routing issues going on within the soundcard or Cubase. Even if he were monitoring analog and then monitoring through the soundcard when recording, the difference should be tiny.