When I am plugging my bass guitar (a Sterling RAY 35) into the MOD Duo I have to select the “low” input stage and select the lowest input setting (all way back to -12).
Minor nitpick: someone else already said that the definition of the input stages is not too clear, but I suppose the “low” input stage is the one with the highest attenuation (for hot signals).
But even then it is possible to clip the input stage of the MOD Duo. And I didn’t even use the onboard EQ.
I don’t know if this is possible to change, but for me the input stages are too sensitive (even in the highest setting).
On the other hand the output stage is not very hot if I try to drive a power amp (but maybe it would work better for me with a nice limiter or compressor plugin)
I am normally using this bass and the power amp with an analog preamp (Aguilar Tonehammer) without any problems. Before that I’ve used a Sansamp RBI and didn’t have any clipping problems (on the input and the output stage).
Maybe a signal meter for the input signal (or a generic signal meter plugin) would be nice (something a little bit more granular than the clipping lights)
I also don’t get what Low, Mid, High means. Even with passive Strat-PUs, I have to set it to low and with passive Humbuckers, I have to reduce the gain even further in the Fine Adjust-section. Setting it to Mid or High with said guitars leads to immediate clipping.
Could somebody from the MOD team explain these features more precisely and tell us if it’s expected behaviour?
I think it is pretty clear what these 3 stages mean:
Low -> low sensitivity input (for hot signals)
Mid -> medium sensitivity input (for not so hot signals)
High -> high sensitivity input (for small signals)
Then you can fine adjust the sensitivity with the gain setting (in the input category)
The explanation of @rogeriocouto says that a yellow LED is fine, red is ok, but as soon as it is red and blinking you are clipping and this is bad.
To me, it’s not really clear, as my passive humbucker PUs would be regarded as being “hot” and I guess you’d say that only when comparing them to single coils, but not to what we’re talking about.
Red, starting at -3dB, is not enough headroom at all. Unless the the dynamic of the used instrument is extremely small, aiming for red would inevitably bring frequent clippings.
For the guitar, in special, even the constant yellow is not clipping free depending on how you play.
When recording digitally I aim for 10dB headroom and this is working pretty well for me.
But I didn’t know the thresholds for the colour changes, so I’ve aimed for green and back it off if it ever reached yellow (I thought this would mean something like -3dB). This may have been to conservative and so I am going to try to play on the upper border of green with the occasional hint of yellow. This may have been one of the reasons why I was not too thrilled with the low output of the MOD Duo…
