Thanks for the info.

I highly doubt that it is the soundcard that has been causing my woes, as I've recorded other stuff in via it before and it's been fine. I tend to agree that it seems to be a characteristic of the wave produced by the synth itself.

That being the case, it still causes tremendous trouble when it comes to doing the mixdown/mastering. Essentially the sound "sounds" right and sits in the mix at a nominal level, but any attempt to increase the level of the mix causes havoc.

Does Logic have an AllPass filter? (I cant remember seing one off hand). I'll try that as well.

On a side note, it is interesting to see how the wave shape varies so greatly from the h/w synths to the soft synths. I tried 3 or 4 softies and used a single saw oscillator and all of them came out looking very much as you'd expect a saw wave to look (very mathematical). The h/w units all produce waves which exhibit other characteristics, so a saw wave looks like it's been filtered and morphed slightly with a sine wave etc.

I can confirm that I do get some spiking at the bottom of the saw wave from my Virus TI.
And this is when I record through Virus Control.

I don't think this is your problem to be honest. Have you checked for sub sonic rumble in your mix?
That can sometimes eat up headroom like crazy, causing problems when trying to boost the gain of the mix.

Yep, I put a low cut and hi cut filter to take everyting below 40hz and above 17khz on this particular set of tests.
No matter how I filter that saw wave, it always has these damned spikes in it. the one i sampled in from the TI wasn't as bad as the 8080 though.

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--|--\-|--\----- is what I expect
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--|--\--|--\---- is what i get
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hmm... ascii diagram didn't come out so well

Yeah that's what the preview button's for mate. Save yourself the embarrassment!

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Jono27. I know this sounds daft but try using different cables to hook up the synths. Bridged cold and ground shouldn't in theory make a difference but humor me please - go and get just mono cables i.e two conductor cable not three.

Will do. I am going to try using standard mono cable and a different sound card.

If it still does it after that then it is definately the waveform produced by the synth itself.

In which case, I guess I'll either have to find some way to correct that or ignore it completely and leave the mixdown looking all lop sided

did you try the allpass yet? if you dont have one in logic, go download Electi-Q, a great EQ which has an allpass mode.

Hey,

I haven't tried the allpass yet. Will do that this evening.

I did manage to test multiple cables and different sound cards. All give exactly the same result. So on the positive side I know theres nothing wrong with my cables or soundcard

It would definately appear to be a product of the actual synthesizer, either there is something wrong with the synth or this is a natural occurence of that type of waveform shape.

I did check with the synth manufacturers on ouput levels as well, and they recommend using -10dbV not +4. So I will be adjusting the 24i/o to use -10 and decrease the master level on the various synths.

I can't find a MAC AU version of Electri-Q ?

hmm idk about AU, try the kvr website's plugin search thing. Or is there a VST wrapper for logic?