Again, maybe I'm just Fractal illiterate, but I find it crazy that you can't just plug this thing into a set of studio speakers, pick a factory reset such as...let's say their Dual Rec, and it sound completely un-usable and nothing like a Dual Rec.
Right, but...you should be able to do exactly that. People do it all the time.
None of the factory presets I tried were quite to my liking, but they didn't sound
bad, they just weren't sounds that I wanted. People praise the factory presets all the time, and according to cooper carter, one of them was used unchanged in some huge thing like a bowl game halftime show or something (can't remember the details).
It's not a matter of being fractal illiterate. Something is wrong, and we've been trying to figure out what.
I don't think it's cables....broken/flawed line level cables don't sound muddy. They sound like crackling, dropouts, or silence. A bad guitar cable
can sound muddy if it's crazy long or super high-capacitance. But it won't also sound thin if that's the problem.
There's also no reason I can think of that a MIDI cable should cause audible noise either unless they're run alongside certain unbalanced audio cables running into a gain stage (amplifier, powered speaker, the guitar input, etc.). If that were the problem, you'd also get it from your phone when you get a call or text message and probably would have noticed. Either way, shielding the audio cable seems like a better approach than shielding the MIDI cable...or just not running them right next to each other. But, I really can't imagine it being a huge problem either way. Or, at least, I've never noticed it being a huge problem either way in a long time.
There are some hifi or "audiophile" data cables out there that are objectively crap because the snake oil salesmen that make them ignored the published specs and did something silly to make their cables more expensive and then flat-out lied about them being better. But, even they don't generally cause the symptoms you're describing...they just drastically reduce the maximum usable length compared to what's in the published spec. But, AFAIK, the worst offenders are USB cables. And they still don't cause these kinds of audio problems...they just don't work if you try to use one that's too long.
The Adam A7Vs have some DSP controls on the back that could make them sound thin if you have them set wrong for your placement, and they'll integrate corrections from Sonarworks if you want to go that route. I would have suggested it except that it's kind of a PITA (and costs money)...and there are a lot of things you have to get more-or-less correct before that correction really works...and you won't give us/me information about how they're set up in your room.
The fact that it's happening in 3 different rooms
is concerning. I can imagine certain physical placements of those speakers (the Adams and the Friedman) in certain "bad" rooms that could cause those kinds of sound problems, but you didn't answer questions about the physical speaker setup. So, I can't know that. It also shouldn't be the same in every key that you might play in - e.g., some keys would sound thin and others would sound too thick...at least most of the time.
At this point, cel phone pictures of the setup/room and audio recording (also with the phone) of the sound in the room
may help.
Taking out as many variables as possible is also something that will help, which we've suggested:
1. Factory presets (you do this, good)
2. Default global settings (it seems like you've done this in the past...maybe you've changed something and forgotten about it)
3. Plug the fractal straight into one speaker at a time (I don't think you've done this)
4. Picture of the speakers/room from your listening position (you haven't done this)
5. Even a cel phone recording of the sound in the room may help us hear a bit of what you hear.
Maybe those will help us narrow it down.
