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The interface is making a significant amount of noise, even with all settings down. It's a bit of white noise laced with a light high pitched buzzing. Possibly electrical? Any suggestions?

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RemyRAD Fri, 12/02/2011 - 23:08

Is your interface creating a lot of noise with nothing plugged into it? Is it only making the noise when the ART tube preamp is plugged into it? You do understand that the tube microphone preamp doesn't amplify the microphone with its tube. So it could be the little preamp IC chips that do have the possibility to go into oscillation that are the actual preamplifiers. The little IC chip microphone preamps, feed a tube that a) doesn't amplify anything, b) barely has enough voltage on it to squeeze any signal out of, c) has yet more oscillation prone IC chips to amplify the output from the " plate starved " tube, d) tubes need more than +9 V AC, 800 milliamp power supplies for the 12 V current sucking heaters & 250 V DC on the plate to make it amplify anything. The ART tube microphone preamp is not really a tube microphone preamp. e) gain staging may be completely incorrect between the output of the preamp and input to the interface. And that might be because the 1/4 inch outputs from the ART are feeding the 1/4 inch inputs to your interface that might actually be designed for lower level guitars than a +4 with +22 DB output capability, to an input designed for -20/-30 DB output from a guitar pick up. This would in effect be amplifying a whole lot of noise since gain staging may be off by more than 30 DB. This has become a common problem for a lot of these audio interfaces with combo XLR/1/4 inch inputs. They might look like they are designed for line level but they really aren't. This may require that you obtain or build a simple unbalanced, L pad to put on the output of the preamp before the input to the interface to finally get your gain staging optimized.

It's up, it's down, because it goes all around
Mx. Remy Ann David