Latest re-amping idea

[shasha]

Been too busy to do any playing the last month or so, but having a few weeks away from the box let me come back to it with a fresh set of eyes. I've been wanting to be able to monitor and record with my firewire audio interface while being able to re-amp via analog just because trying to do it digitally causes too many clock issues between the AxeFXII and the firewire interface. So I just came across a used MIDIMan Flying Cow A/D D/A converter. Its a few years old and it only goes up to 48kHz, but that's all the AxeFXII spits out anyway. So I took the SPDIF output and sent it to the Flying Cow and then took the left balanced output and sent that to an input on my interface. Then I set the SPDIF output to input inside the audio menu of the AxeFXII. I get a dry guitar signal from the SPDIF, convert it to analog and record it along with the analog outputs of the AxeFXII into the other channels. Its nice and clean (I was worried about SNR since the dry guitar signal is so low).

Initial tests sound really promising, there was no need to switch master and slave clocks and its clean and the only thing I need to do is switch the input of the AxeFXII from front input to SPDIF (taking the SPDIF output of the interface and feeding the AxeFXII).

The Flying Cow is half a rack unit wide and is stupid simple to use and for less than $100 used and delivered I think that it may have fixed a whole lot of silly issues I was having while making the workflow much easier.

Now one other thing that I can do is record at any sample rate that the firewire interface can handle, but I'd have to use the second analog input and if memory serves that may be too noisy to pull off. I've got some experimenting to do this weekend.

I know that I'm using a digital modeler into a digital audio workstation, but analog is just so much easier to deal with. No clocks, no sync issues, less jumping through hoops.

 

[Speculum Speculorum]

You know - I have been re-amping analog through the same interface as you. It was weird because at first I was looking at a shit-pot of noise as well. I'd input the dry signal via Spdif and send out and back in through analog, and I started noticing it was a freaking hum city. Then I figured it out - the Saffire Pro 14 has a bit of an issue keeping the cables from touching - once I made sure they were never touching each other, there has not been a single ioda of noise issue from my end of things. It's clear man. I'll be posting some bass and guitar stuff tomorrow hopefully, at the latest Sunday. Be on the look out.

 

[shasha]

Cool deal. I've got a Saffire 24Pro DSP and I love the damn thing. I did find out that the analog outputs on the Flying Cow are only balanced for XLR so I made up a cable and its like super frickin hot now. I mean it sounds really clean, but even with everything fully attenuated it's boosting the signal somewhere and I do think that I have a phase issue as well (which would probably be a me problem).

The really great thing I discovered though is that this little box does A/D and D/A simultaneously. I wasn't expecting that at all. I was able to set up a project at 96kHz and use the SPDIF for all the re-amping. Only issue is that the levels are so hot for the dry that I have to attenuate it to -18dB during playback.

I'm really jazzed about this though; it's going to fit right into my rack, sounds pretty damn good so far and will take care of so many issues that for the money I am just blown away.

The wife and kid are going to visit her parents for a few weeks so I will be rebuilding my rack sometime next week and will make up some nice AES cables to go with it.

 

[shasha]

Found the gain issue; turns out that the front panel is mic/line/instrument level which I already knew. There is a software switch that will select between inst/line and I was set to line which should be right....but apparently it automatically defaults to mic level if it detects and XLR connector on the input. Put a TRS on there and it's the right level now.

I can't figure out where the phase reversal is occurring, but I put I just put an insert on the dry track to invert it with a 4ms track delay and everything seems to sync up nicely at 96kHz, good levels, in phase, etc. I do get a little bit more noise on the floor of the signal which is to be expected, but I was able to knock it out with just a tiny bit of gate on the AxeFXII and its sounding really good right now.

Pretty sure that if I just stick with 48kHz and go SPDIF from the audio interface though that not only will the noise be gone, but I'll probably get even lower latency.

This silly looking little box is working pretty good!

One other thing that's kind of weird....look at the back of the box in the picture and see if you can tell me what's wrong with it. I'm glad I caught it before I started making up a bunch of cables for it.