Hello @QuestionMarc ,
I hope you get items sorted and it could be worse if these countries were in different parts of the world…
I will miss your help, expertise and opinion here in the forum.
Greetings and God bless, Marius
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Thanks for your kind words @mj_prod! 
There will be two ocean crossings and two hemisphere changes, but it will be worth it! 
See you all in the Fall! 
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Interesting that you should ask, as I just changed the pickups on the most recent bass I was testing with and I purposely set them a little higher than the last ones. HOWEVER—these are lipstick pickups so their output isn’t that hot, even though this new set is hotter than the set I replaced. That being said, I had the same clipping issues with the lower-height, lower output pickups.
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Safe travels… may you find some musical inspirations along the journey!
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Has this issue been resolved? I’ve just bought a mod dwarf and the noise is horrible, great piece of kit otherwise.
I was going to start a new topic and then I saw this. I had noise at a gig in the weekend using analog mixer (no DIs) and it was unbearable. I have been connecting it with a BSS DI at home and other gigs so far, and it didn’t have noise with a balanced connection. Of course a 400 euros device is not excused from having noisy outputs, even with an unbalanced connection.
Googling “mod dwarf noise” took me to this article in the MOD wiki Dealing with noise issues - MOD Wiki which basically sums up to: It’s everything else’s fault, except the MOD dwarf. No MOD, its your fault and the device obviously has poor or no shielding. When you have an audio interface close to noisy components, like CPUs, there needs to be shielding in the analog circuit. Motherboard manufacturers figured this out years ago, why couldn’t you?
At some point MOD needs to admit the issue, stop blaming users and take action. The ground loop compensation makes it better, but its still audible as you can hear in the video. The high pitched noise mostly goes away, but a low pitched one remains with a white noise background. Also, I don’t see why I have to sacrifice CPU power for less noise anyway, because of the incompetence of MOD’s engineers to properly shield a 400+ euro device.
Here is the proof. Connecting both the MOD dwarf (default pedalboard with no plugins loaded) and an old cheap guitar pedal at the same line on a RME babyface pro, with the same cable and both power supplies on the same socket - aka no excuses. The zoom pedal is practically mute with not even the slightest noise, while the dwarf is unacceptable even with the loop compensation on: (sorry for the story format, YouTube didn’t give me a choice)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x7LIsLnDS4k
I bought it from Thomann and I want to return it, but the 30 days passed. Anyone from MOD can guide me through the process of returning it now? I doesn’t feel right paying 435 euros for something that’s unusable from the noise it produces.
So there was no noise for 30 days with a balanced connection, what was different?
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It was balanced with a DI? It always had noise with unbalanced connection (as many others have noticed already) It just happened that I didn’t use it with an unbalanced connection until this weekend.
Since it’s a guitar oriented device that many will want to connect to an amp (unbalanced) it’s really unacceptable to have that kind of noise.
Ah, got you.
I’m using mine unbalanced with no noise.
Some get noise here though it seems the PSU is usually the main problem, maybe I have a good one.
where are you connecting it unbalanced? maybe not enough gain to hear the noise?
Hi, I just did some tests.
Into an Appolo Duo with 23db gain (which gives me a around 0db with the dwarf in the yellow)
I see Mains hum at -102db and some high frequency hiss at -125db to -90db.
So the noise floor here is -90db which isn’t bad, if I turn everything up max I can hear hiss but no other digital noise.
I have a Mod Duo as well, that thing is very noisy with USB attached but ok if you disconnect USB.
Hopefully someone like @Jon will come along and offer some troubleshooting…
I was talking about idle noise (not noise you will get from an amp/distortion plugin) which should be absolutely zero and its not. The USB was not connected on mine, you can see it on the video I uploaded.
Unless there is something faulty on my specific unit and it get replaced, I dont think there is any “troubleshooting” that can be done on my part. I think I proved my point on the video I made.
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Sorry I was trying to help, I was not talking about amp/distortion so I have no idea what you are talking about. I showed a frequency graph which shows I do not get the noise that you have on your video.
Hopefully someone with more patience than me will be able to deal with your attitude!
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did you test it with another power supply? I used some that came with my harddisks and they work fine without noise.
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Wow, I couldn’t believe it, but that was the issue. I remember admiring the “quality” of the power supply when I first saw it, but looks were… deceiving! The dwarf works with absolutely no noise (as intended) with a 12V/2A power supply from an external hard drive. I was curious if the noise came from the fact that the original power supply has grounding pins on the plug, so I put tape on the power outlet to test it without ground connected, but the noise was the same.
Still, MOD is not excused to include such a crappy power supply with an expensive device… I will try to contact support and get a replacement and hopefully different power supply, because I need the hard drive’s one and I am not paying for another out of my own pocket.
yeah its been reported many times - it’s kind of a bummer that any other cheap, standard power supply will do but not the one included.
I get its frustrating but I just used the nice looking dwarf one for my harddisk on my desk (I don’t know how many of these I colleceted over the years) and leave it at that.
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Indeed that is true. Anyway, if you read through the forum (I think even in this thread) you will read us admiting that due to the supply chain issues we were forced to buy power supplies from different providers and some batches seem to be more prone to noise issues with certain setups. We also offered solutions for that. If you want, please reach out support@mod.audio and we will also find a way to compensate you
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Well if you had read what I had already told you:
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A classic case of RTFM (or RTFF).
Any device that has electricity running through it will produce a certain amount of noise. Please refer to Howard Tremaine’s “Audio Cyclopedia”, possibly the most comprehensive book ever written in audio engineering.
Current switching power sources produce also a noise like the one you’re experiencing, medium to high pitch. PSUs are supposed to havr extra filtering in place for that, either an isolating transformer (a rare case) or at least and induction bead, Seems like a batch of Mod PSUs came with poor filtering.
To repair or replace a faulty Mod unit, please contact support@mod.audio
Good luck.
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