External inputs sound bad?

Leyy · 2014-06-15T17:01:50.000Z

Hey,
I borrowed a friend’s machinedrum, A4 is the master clock and the machinedrum’s outputs are going into the A4’s inputs.

When the A4 is playing by itself everything is alright, but when the machinedrum plays at the same time the A4’s sound goes to shit, but when i’m using an audio interface and they are going into separate inputs everything sounds good.

Wat do ?

4.33 · 2014-06-15T17:51:19.000Z

check if inputs are going thru FX track and some effect

tonight · 2014-06-16T12:00:09.000Z

“sound goes to sh1t”

is not really useful if you want help

Leyy · 2014-06-24T17:38:06.000Z

well if an A4 sound is playing at the same time as a MD sound, the A4 sounds heavily distorted, but it doesn’t happen if the MD is playing way quieter than the A4.

analogback · 2014-06-24T18:09:52.000Z

a4 internal mixer overloading?

tried turning down both the A4 amp and MD output?

you can turn up your sc input then>> still sound pox?

the_dreammer · 2014-06-24T18:12:42.000Z

something wrong with your gains/leveling??

If i take my machinedrum… make a pattern… and just connect it to my octatrack… it doesnt sound good at all… then i measure it all… and i find out that the leveling of everything is way to loud. .

takes some tinkering and all that… but when i reduce overal volume of the machinedrum… and the overal level of the octatrack… everything sounds a whole lot better…

weirdly enough… I can record my machinedrum with everything as loud as possible in my vs2400 with no clipping and all that… I dont know why…

Anigbrowl · 2014-06-24T20:55:02.000Z

Seems like the A/D converters on Elektron gear overload really easily, maybe this is why the OT defaults to -12dB gain on the inputs.

Mod Edit : Added link for clarification below, it’s a common misunderstanding it seems … Inputs not attenuated on OT, see here for info

Gain aGain Octatrack

Ah, i think i have discovered that there’s been a bit of a prior misunderstanding, possibly on my part and it’s been perpetuated … I tried Setting the Gain to 0 on the mixer to see how far i could push the DE, it could go way beyond the 1/4 scale captures you’d see if the inputs were categorically being lowered by -12dB … but not far enough, the VCA seemed to level off after about 7>8 and it was maybe 2/3rds or more full-scale on the OT and the shape was good/clean (red inputs) So i stacked up…

switchbox · 2014-06-24T21:43:28.000Z

are you using the inputs at the fx-page or do you use one voice with osc set to in L or R ?..when you use the inputs as oscillator source its easy to crank the amp to distortion when the patch is triggered and polyphony is enabled…the voice is doubletriggered every cycle…or the resonances of the filters are too high, then the sound will really distort heavily…also check overdrive.