Lower noise input whilst recording in Ardour

[gaioshin]

Hi guys,

I currently run a very low power setup, consisting of an Acer Revo R3610 (with one headphone out, and one mic in !!). I do a lot of my recording by plugging either of my dynamic mics into a Phonic PowerPod 740 powered mixer, which then has a rec out, plugged into the microphone port.

Surprisingly, the onboard sound latency isn't too bad (well, not bad enough for me to notice), yet I find that the background noise seems particularly high, plus there is crosstalk - I can hear the clicktrack on recordings!! - which leads me to believe its the onboard sound. Perhaps I have JACK crosswired with an audio output at low level by accident? But I'm not sure how that could've happened. I've eliminated most obvious causes of environmental noise too.

I've read that people have had some luck in getting the Behringer UCA202 to work with their system - I guess my question is, assuming its not the Phonic PowerPod's preamp, would a USB soundcard help in the fight against noise? I've no doubt that the Revo was built to a tight cost (of course, its the size of a Wii, so it has to be) so maybe onboard sound isn't the best option there?

In the event that the noise is somehow introduced by the PowerPod, my next strategy would be to get an ART MP Tube

All your thoughts and expertise welcome,


gaioshin

[Pablo]

Hi,

It seems that there is some internal mixing in the audio card. You can access the internal mixer and, hopefully, fix the problem by means of alsamixer. Anyway, I don't think you will have this problem with the UCA202.

Cheers! Pablo

[gaioshin]

Thanks Pablo - I've had a brief look around and noticed that there are gain settings which I didn't see before on the alsamixer, I'll see whether I can raise the level on preamping and lower the gain generally. I didn't see anything else on there that would indicate any sort of valid input from looping back from audio out though, which was strange.

Thanks for your input - I'll probably post the results of my investigation if I get some time to do some more recording this weekend


gaioshin