Question

I have recently recorded some folks who use a drum machine with a very loud bass drum transient, and the bassist hits the strings really hard.  Too often I'm getting distortion artifacts in the recorded result, but no distortion appears in the hardware monitoring.  The meters are nowhere near peaking.

I've effectively recorded bass on the same system/input without distortion, but then I play with a light touch.

 If I had to guess the distortion is occurring in the A/D stage.

If I pad down the inputs the monitoring becomes too quiet for effective use.  Is there some setting that allows for hardware monitoring at a reasonable volume yet doesn't distort in the recording?  I'm sure I'm going to run into more ham-fisted players in the future, and would like to have a solution.

System: i7 quad core, 16gig RAM, Presonus FireStudio Tube, Sonar Platinum, genuine TI firewire chip,

Answer 1

Does the distortion only occur with drums or also any other audio source ?

Does the distortion occur with another DAW ?

Does the distortion occur with basic audio playback using YouTube ?

Bypass hardware monitoring and enable "direct input monitoring" in Sonar.  Does distortion occur ?

If the answer is yes to any of these, contact PreSonus Support.  You may have hardware failure or a more intrinsic conflict with your computer connections and or installed drivers.