I don’t think any potential coloring from the Focusrite should necessarily be attributed to its price.
I have upgraded to this DAI a while ago:
and it has a JFET instrument input (for guitar, bass, etc) that is actually designed to add harmonically rich, tube-like color to the input signal from the instrument.
Of course, it also has a more standard (“clean”) line/mic input (with additional phantom power).
What I especially like about this interface is the monitor mix/blend dial (that @howard also referred to in one of his replies) to allow you to adjust what you hear while recording (and not just with an either-or switch).
I realize this doesn’t solve your current problem, and I also don’t want to give the impression that just buying new hardware makes all problems go away, but I did not regret upgrading to the Audient from my previous DAI (a Roland Rubix, which, I think, is comparable to the Scarlett in price and performance).
I am not as concerned about the unit adding color or not, this I can deal with.
My issue is that during monitoring of recording and then listening during playback, the sound is markedly different, and it should not be. If I am monitoring while recording and ‘dialing in’ my tone, then I should hear that same tone profile when i hit play for playback. The tone coloring of an input should show in both of the above.
Based on the soundcloud samples above, it does appear that the “high quality” setting does something on one vs. the other (monitor while recording / monitor playback) through both the headphone and direct monitor outs. When switched to “normal”, it gets a lot closer, so much so I would say ‘close enough’. I have not yet dug in to see if this setting is in the driver or Abelton. Either way, don’t like it so will try the next recording in normal mode and see how it goes.
I did some Googling and found a few other folks who rose a similar issue and were told it was perception. Based on the sound samples above this is clearly not the case. As an engineer who needs things to make sense before accepting them, I at least had to know what was the root cause. Now I know how to avoid it (hopefully).
I understand and I realize my reply wasn’t super helpful in that regard
So, as you guys have been inching closer to, the problem may lie with whatever signal processing is going on in Ableton… one quick try could be to use either GarageBand or Reaper instead and see whether you experience similar issues.
If you want to dive deeper to satisfy your engineering curiosity, you might have to look more into “sampling” (including over- and undersampling), “Nyquist limit”, “anti-aliasing” and similar stuff that are somewhat out of my pay grade (It is usually here where I’d hope that @DaveT would chime in )
Good idea to try another DAW. I am starting to get a little pissed that I splurged for Abelton. I only pulled the trigger cause a guy that works for me uses it and figured he could be my tech support. There are several things I don’t like about it.
There’s a low frequency EQ bump. It sounds like the kind of “enhanced bass” that PCs use to make crappy speakers or headphones sound better. I’d hunt to make sure no audio enhancement settings are on anywhere on the computer control panels.
To narrow things down, I support recording a track in Audacity. It’s simple and free. Then you know whether to hunt in Ableton or in the computer.
Maybe. Assuming the direct monitor from the DAI takes the same path through the OS that Ableton does. For stuff like this I tend to try any experiment that’s easy even if it I can’t explain it. Sometimes I learn an explanation I didn’t know about.
Bass goes into Focusrite which goes into PC which goes into Abelton via the Focusrite ASIO driver.
Headphones are plugged into the Focusrite Headphone jack.
Monitors are plugged into the Focusrite Monitor outputs on back of Focusrite, direct monitor switch turned on.
The two modes are:
Press record in abelton and play, sound plays through headphones / monitors
Stop recording, press play in Abelton
The sound clips posted above were done by sticking my iPhone in front of one of the monitors and using voice memo to record both modes in one clip.
Although the recording was done using the monitors on the back of the focusrite, the same effect can be observed in both the monitors and the headphones.
Based on this, the assumption would be any PC based mods would effect both, no?
Unless the signal path is different on the focusrite monitor and headphone outputs for recording and playback, which seems unlikely and why I point to the ASIO driver or abelton or abelton’s control of the ASIO driver.
How can this be true if the direct monitor is outputing the backing track that is in abelton playing while I am recording? The question might be instead, does the DAI take the bass signal direct and the backing track from the DAW, and on playback they BOTH come from the DAW (obviously). This could be a thing I guess.
I was not able to replicate your experience with my old 1st gen Scarlett solo and Ableton Live. No special settings at all. I just plugged in the Solo and started recording and what I can hear through the direct monitor is the same I get as playback when I play the recording.
Can you look in the config settings in ableton and see if the “High Quality” setting is selected or if it is grey and says “Normal”. If “Normal” can you flip it to High Quality and check?
(It is usually here where I’d hope that 
)
