Hi,
My setup is pretty basic: the Analog Heat (Mk1) is at the end of the chain of my live setup (including various machines going into AH’s analog input), so my main output is AH’s analog output, as follow:
Machines -> AH analog input -> AH FX -> AH analog output -> master/sound engineer/sound system/
I would like to record the sound coming from the analog input of the AH (so not affected by AH’s FX) onto my computer but I can’t manage to do it properly.
My first though was to plug the AH in USB to my computer, set it to OB mode, open the AH standalone app, and use its record feature, but sadly I can’t figure out how to set everything up to work the way I want.
First, opening AH standalone app doubles the audio output with a slight delay. To avoid this, I simply shut down the AH output inside of the ASIO control panel (another solution is to disable monitoring inside the Audio Capture windows from the AH standalone app). Then, in the AH standalone app, I click the Audio Capture button (at the right of the device selection menu), and turn on Capture below the the Input vu meter, as shown below:
From this image you can already see the problem I’m facing: input level is completely saturated. If I monitor it from the computer, it sounds over saturated. If I hit “Start Capture” then listen to the recorded audio, it’s over saturated, and I can’t get why. On the AH, Input sensitivity is correcty set (to medium, so that input level never goes above maximum), and listening to the dry signal from the AH analog output by turning the dry/wet knob all the way down to the left or by pushing the “Active” button to bypass the FX section leads to a clean, normal, expected dry signal. Why such a difference???
I though that the analog input was somehow added on top of itself, so I turned on “Mute audio input” inside of AH standalone app’s Options menu, and selected “none” as “Input”, but the problem remains. Turning the Monitoring gain all the way down to -24dB indeed helps getting a clean monitored sound, but the recorded input audio is still overy saturated.
The only way I found to record the analog input through USB is by setting USB CONFIG to USB AUDIO/MIDI instead of OVERBRIDGE, and USB CC MODE to PRE. This way I can open, say, Audacity, select the AH as audio input and record it, and the level is as expected.
Why the audio coming from the AH analog inputs (basically the dry signal) is oversatured through OB, but clean as expected with compliant audio USB? By “oversaturated”, it is by no mean “as if it was processed by the AH saturation section”, but just “as if I doubled the gain of the incoming audio”.
To me, either recording the “Input” audio through AH standalone app is broken for some reason, either I still don’t get something in the routing configuration.
TLDR: I assumed it would be simple to just use the AH standalone app to simply record what’s coming into the AH, but apparently it’s not.
Does anyone has some hints?