I’ve been playing guitar for 19+ years and I used to have Cubase 5 a long time ago and things sounded good. I had to quit home recording for a while (but sill practiced playing) to pursue my career. As of Jan 2021 I started getting serious about things again and bought a lot of new equipment. I’ve slowly and carefully spent a LOT of time dialing in each and every piece of equipment ( Real amps through Captor X, Mic’d up amps, Helix, Laney IRT studio, etc and everything sounds great until my guitar chain hits my DAW. Once I get my chain into Cubase 12 Pro the sound is crap. It sounds like everything is recorded in mono even when I make everything stereo. My highs gain tones sound thin, loss of bass, and crap highs. Clean tones sound much better but also suffer.
In my attempt to fix this issue I’ve tried 4 different interfaces! M-Audio (something ), Scarlett 2i2 (3rd Gen), Helix - setup as my interface, and now I’m using the Clarett+ 8pre. My chain sounds good direct monitoring to each of these but once I open Cubase and turn on Cubase direct monitoring in a track it sounds bad.
I was stumped by this and tried many other things but nothing fixed it.
So LAST NIGHT, I decided to experiment by opening STL Tonehub but this time the stand alone without running through Cubase and it sounds great! I thought what is going on, is the problem Cubase??
So I downloaded the lastest version of Presonus and did a test record and recorded one high gain STL ToneHub recording panned L and another R and it sounded great . It was thick, clear, highs good, and sounded like a legit stereo recording.
I typically make mix downs to listen to while driving to work. So I made a mix down of the recording in presonus and played it back on windows media player but the mono cap sound was back again!! Frustrated by this.
So I decided to send that recording to 2 different places, first my phone so I could listen to it in my car and it actually sounded legit. Second I sent that mix down back in to Presonus and compared it to the original tracks and the audio was identical.
So… Somethings going on! I don’t wish to use Presonus because I have about $600 invested in Cubase. And whatever the issue is I just want it fixed.
I’m guessing it’s not the interface, not Cubase… so is it my PC or something running in the PC that is effecting my tones?