Hi,

yesterday a client came to my studio with the projects for his latest record that he recorded himself and that I should mix and master. I noticed that the tracks sounded very indirect and roomy. My first idea was that he sang through the microphone from the wrong side. Anyway it turned out that  was not the case. Today I visited his homestudio for trouble shooting.

Setup is a desktop pc with mic going to the mic in of a Line6 UX2 and Cubase Le software.

After checking the whole setup I found out, that even though there are no amps/FX selected in the Line6 PodFarm software, there is still a change in sound!!

It is very obvious that when you go to the "tuner" tab, the processing is bypassed and the signal sounds clear and "normal". If you go to any other tab, the sound changes back to... "somehow different".

Also, after I changed the source in the output mixer from "processed" to "dry", Cubase would record the correct signal. (So this was definitely a big part of the solution!)

Normally I'd suggest to completely quit the Line6 software and only use the ASIO driver for the UX2 in Cubase, but unfortunately even the lowest buffer settings produce a quite noticeable delay. So the monitoring is not good.

With the Line6 software the latency is much better (i.e. shorter), but you will always have some unwanted processing in the monitor signal, which worsens the sound.

So the questions remain:

What kind of processing is going on anyway? (since all amps/fx etc have been removed from the signal path)

Is there any way to bypass the processing and just have the unaltered input signal for both monitoring and recording?

Thanks

Kai