Trouble with Apogee Duet - Any Help?

  • Thread starter Thread starter jmcdonough120
  • Start date Start date
J

jmcdonough120

New member
OK, so after doing a bunch of research on audio interfaces, I took the big plunge and bought an Apogee Duet. A used item from a Guitar Center. Took delivery a couple days later, set everything up and was excited to play around making some recordings of my, admittedly, mediocre guitar playing.

Here's the problem; I can plug in my guitar pickup and record and everything is good. I'm monitoring with headphones and it's nice and quiet. Cool. Then I plug in the two small diaphragm condenser microphones, get ready to record and hear what sounds like a windstorm in the headphones. Record the signal and hear the same thing in the playback. (Playback is fine with iTunes and previously recorded Garageband tracks). I plug the mics into my old interface, a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2, and the mics are nice and quiet. Call Apogee Tech Support and, after spending a couple hours on the phone, they guess the Duet's mic preamps are bad and suggest I send it back to Guitar Center for a refund. That works fine (thank you Guitar Center).

Not ready to give up on the Duet yet, I bought a factory refurbished Duet from Amazon. It arrives, I set it up and it has exactly the same problem as the previous unit. Call Apogee Tech Support and they opened a Support Ticket. (I've not heard back from them yet).

So, I either have something wrong in my setup or there's a problem with Duets that I didn't foresee.

Anyone had similar issues or a suggestion for what I might be doing wrong?
 
Anyone? Would really appreciate any ideas you have.
 
You probably already checked this, but since you didn't say, are you sure you have phantom power on to the mics?

J
 
Just a quick guess but it's vaguely similar to an under-powered microphone. I do a lot of video and film production and many shotgun microphones are battery powered... if the battery is going dead it can make some noises that sound like wind. So I can imagine if the phantom power supply is going bad it may do similar things. If you have a battery powered or dynamic mic see if the noise goes away when you use those.
 
Thanks. That kinda makes some sense. The mics both work with two different interfaces (Scarlett 2i2 and Zoom H4N). I switched the mics in the two channels of the Duet and the noise is in Channel 2 regardless of which mic I use. I unfortunately don't have either a battery powered or dynamic mic to test.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top