Mic signal going up to 24 on the meter without input.....

Been struggling through the night trying to get a mic signal into Logic with no luck. Having tried everything possible I’m almost resigned to believing my Apogee Duet has gone faulty.

Given that my input meter is now reading 24 on my channel strip mic input without giving it any signal load would that suggest there is something going wrong inside the Duet. That is, a faulty component is creating this signal?

It's too early to deterimne that something is wrong with the Duet, you need to do some troubleshooting, and we can help with that. Is anything connected to the Duet? If you adjust the input gain, can you see a difference in what you're metering?

Hi David!

Only thing connected to the Duet is the speakers and the SM7b.

No - nothing happening on input gain if I speak into mic, however, there is a constant green up to 24 on the meter and this isn’t coming from mic input (of course I’m already set up for mic input on mic input 2) but that signal is there wether record enable is engaged or not.

It’s been a head wrecker all right - I have all gain knobs at max in Maestro and the silver knob at max. Set input monitoring to on just as a possibility and when I do so I’m getting radio stations playing????? I googled that and while there has been little talk about radio frequencies entering it does happen - a couple of engineer types on Gearslutz talked about this and while it seems to be very rare it has happened to me twice! I had this occur about a year ago in another apartment. However, I don’t think this is related to my input problem, just thought I’d throw that out just in case.

So far I’ve restarted, tried every possibility of settings in Maestro, tried phantom power even though I knew this mic wouldn’t need it, changed out the already new Mogami cables, unplugged/plugged everything multiple times - I honestly think I’ve exhausted every possibility but I’m all ears for your suggestions. I’m

Edited April 14, 2021 by Trashytommy

Just to add to that David - I think that meter reading will tell me a lot as to wether there is a problem with the Duet - it seems the meter is reading a “leak” inside the unit since the mic itself is not providing a signal, that’s why I’m leaning towards the Duet having a problem......does that make sense?

 

Edit - I just had a thought.....if we conclude that the Duet is screwed itself - it’s playing though the speakers ok, so it’s working as an interface. If the component that provides the mic signal is broken could I bypass the converters/DAC by using a separate mic preamp - I have one of these across town.

Ok, great to hear you ended up finding the culprit! Like I said, you don't need the cloudlifter with the SM7b anyway. Keep things simple!