Hi,
I loaded a mix project today, free multitracks from a perfectly respectable source. The first thing that struck me was the the audio balance seemed shifted somewhat to the left channel. This was disconcerting, so, since I was monitoring on headphones, I swapped them round on my ears - hoping it’s not my ears giving up - and the balance shift swapped also. So, I swapped headphones, then I swapped out the headphone cable, after first testing the audio balance from a different source; audio from You Tube vids coming from the jack output of my laptop, I even ran a couple of stereo test vids, where everything seemed fine. Then, I loaded a few projects of my own into my DAW and the shift was back.
Is there anything within the settings & preferences within Cubase Pro where this balance issue can be addressed?
Has anyone else had similar issue, or know of any reason why this might occur?
If it had been something such as phase issues with my tracks, I might accept that, but the downloaded mix project tracks have no processing at all, so I’m looking at the DAW being the problem. Any ideas?
There are a lot of places in your signal chain where you could have a pan/balance change applied. Could you go into detail about your routing? The panner on your channel is the first and obvious place to look when you play back a track. Any other channel (output channel?) in the chain could be involved. If you use control room you might have changed pan/balance there as well - and not to forget plugins?
Hi Elien,
Thanks for your input. very appreciative of your time.
I think I’ve solved it, but for anyone else who may need to troubleshoot this, here’s my experience. The first time I noticed this, there were no plugins in action, all tracks were a fresh mix project loaded with all faders at unity gain and no panning. The earlier troubleshooting steps, listed above, showed it wasn’t a montioring issue, since in this case, all monitoring was on heaphones, which were swapped out and tested including cables. It looked something further upstream, i.e. my DAW or my interface. My interface is new (Audient iD22) so I reached for my old interface, a Zoom R16, and when I listened through that, no channel predominant shift, so my suspicions now lay at the feet of my new Audient iD22. I had already tried a reset the iD22’s software mixer app to default setting, by deleting the ‘state.xml’ file in the app folder, but this didn’t resolve the issue. It was only after seeing that the old interface had no issue that I then re-connected the iD22 interface, and whaddaya know - problem vanished.
I honestly don’t think this was as simple as a badly set cable, because I’d already tried out and checked the headphone cables and, since the only other connection is the USB connecting the computer to the interface, it didn’t really take long to check those. My theory is that at some point there was a communication issue between the software of the DAW and the software of the iD mixer app, but it wasn’t until I changed the interface back, that the ‘reset’ took effect. As I say, my interface is new and because I’ve also been exploring its native software in conjunction with my Audient ASP880 pre-amps, to learn more about it’s functionality, I think it was playing in this area that was the start of the troubles. Having a much more sophisticated set up with all sorts of new monitoring and cue mix facilities is fantastic, but also a learning curve. Lesson one for me; proceed with caution.
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