New problem with me little labs red eye and other Di boxes!!!!!

I have had a new problem develop today in the studio with my Di boxes and my AWESOME Little Labs Di/Re-amper boxes. Everything sounds fine UNTIL I plug the XLR cable into them. the guitar tone goes from ROARING death metal bliss with tons of gain to sad thin unhappy blues tone(no beef with the blues but I am tracking the sound track for hell here!) IF I un-plug my TT patch bay OR the XLR from the patch bay OR the XLR from any of the boxes the tone comes SCREAMING back at me BUT no Di for the super important re-amping I must do. IF anyone knows what might be going on please help me. This little labs has been working great for me for 6 months and I have done about 6 albums on it. NOW something has gone to hell in a hand basket. I did just contact clean ALL of my TT patch bay jacks with a silicone based contact cleaner. did this ruin my life?!?!?!?!

Love and Metal Curran

 

I hate to sound like a broken record ( does this vinyl reference still fly? ), I hate to sound like an corrupted mp3 file, but have you tested/checked/inspected the XLR cable?

 

yep

yep, All cables have been swapped out and checked on a tester. I have also swapped out ALL of the TT cables AND even the amp head/cab set up in the iso room. this is a puzzler.

 

Although the symptoms you're describing still sounds like something is wired wrong to me, I gotta ask.....

Exactly what contact cleaner did you use?

 

It sounds like you have manged to cause a mechanical fault in the patchbay, for example, by bending one of the normalling contacts so it is not breaking contact on insertion of the plug.

What happens if you run an XLR cable from the DI box output directly into your audio interface without going through the patchbay?

 

it now seems to only happen on the five fish pre amps I have. with the Yamaha board and the Old School Audio pre amps i am not having the same problem. The problem happens on all four of the five fish pre's. If the TT's are bent then i will need to replace all of them for the four pre's. damn what a head ache.

P.S. the spray is made by MG Chemicals, it is an "electronics contact cleaner with silicone"

 

MG404B? If they're not physically bent, there might be too much silicone in there mucking up the contacts. MG chemicals are high quality products. I used to buy their Superwash all the time. It's a great cleaner/degreaser, which might be exactly what you need here to blast out excessive silicone.

 

Do the test of running the output of the Fish pre-amps directly into your audio interface without going through the patchbay.

 

I will to the straight wire to the O2R96 and see what happens!

 

OK it MUST have been an over spray of the silicone contact cleaner!!!! the issue has GONE AWAY!!!! well I will need to be more conservative in the future with the fancy spray!!!! hoo ****ing ray!!! now i need to finish this song and get back to using my five fish pre's for my DI

 

When you clean the patchbay in the future, you might try Caig Deoxit ( formerly D5 ).