Passive DI into Mic Preamp, am I Understanding this Correctly?

[BigBadBen67]

I do all of my practicing at home via headphones. I live in a condo and it's just easier on the neighbors.

Here's my question. I have an ACME Motown DI that I love. The tone is great but, being passive, the signal is awfully weak. I run that into an Apogee Duet 3 that plugs into my Mac. I can boost the signal some there through the interface software but the sound isn't great. I'm thinking about getting the ART Tube MP Studio V3 Mic Preamp and going bass > ACME DI > Mic Preamp > Apogee. Is that the "right" way to do this? Would that be a good way of boosting the signal?

Thanks!

Ben

 

[silky smoove]

The only “right” way is the one that sounds good to you. If stacking a passive DI, a preamp, and another preamp before hitting the converter sounds good and doesn’t introduce excessive noise then it’s the right thing to do.

 

[And I]

i agree that sounds good = is good. however, several somethings seem wrong here.

a passive DI shouldn't mean a weak signal. are you plugging the bass into the Acme DI and then the Acme out to the Apogee with an XLR cable? If so, the Apogee mic pre is engaged, so adding another (lower quality) mic pre doesn't seem like the best idea. Those Apogee mic pres should give you at least 60db of gain, and a passive DI should have plenty strong signal anyway if the volume on your bass is turned up. Do you have the attenuator on the DI engaged? if so, don't.

 

[silky smoove]

i agree that sounds good = is good. however, several somethings seem wrong here.

I also agree. My only thought is that some passive DIs step the output down considerably in certain situations. I have no experience with the Acme, so I can’t say if that’s the case here.

 

[CatOnTheBass]

As a troubleshooting step, try plugging your bass directly into the Apogee (bypassing the Motown DI completely). Once you have a nice loud sound in your headphones, using the Apogee's built in DI, then experiment with different flavors of DI to color your tone.

According to the manual, the Apogee preamps have 65dB of gain, which should be plenty to use with a passive DI. A good troubleshooting step is to systematically go through all the features in the manual and make sure you haven't accidentally activated something like a 'pad' or 'line level' mode. If your interface has a 'direct monitoring' feature that routes the inputs directly to the headphones (instead of routing through your DAW) then definitely give that a try.