Steinberg UR44 and dbx 286s

Hi! I’m from Russia, my name is Iskander and I’ve become a proud Steinberg UR44 user today :smiley: I’m sorry for speaking English not that well, it’s because my native language is russian.

Everything is working absolutely well, but I need some kind of help with setting up all the stuff. So, I have three devices in my home studio:

  1. Presonus M7 condenser mic (it was actually from Presonus low-cost all-in-one “bundle”, but the Audiobox is dead right now, I’ve already ordered Sennheiser MK4);
  2. dbx 286s preamp-compressor (even if I know about hardware-based FX in UR44, I still need a solo channel hardware compressor/processor to reduce amount of mouseclick-based actions and I’m planning to use 286s not only in my home studio);
  3. Steinberg UR44 (I’ve got it yesterday, planning to record a lot of little instrumental groups).

So, here are the question.

  1. dbx 286s has a XLR balanced input and jack balanced output, while Steinberg UR44 has 4 XLR mic inputs and combined 2 Hi-Z and 2 Line TRS inputs. How should I properly connect and use them together? What should I do to record vocals properly in this case:
  • buy TRS male/TRS male cable and use 3/4 Line inputs at UR44 because the signal is already powered and processed with compressor and deesser?
  • or buy TRS male/XLR male cable and use 1/2 Mic inputs and just stay at not that high input 1/2 gain settings?
  1. I’m writing a lot of vocals lately, so one of the usual job is to write vocal to a backing track, clean/process/fx/pitch-correct/etc vocals and mix it all together. The biggest question for me: how to make a comfortable direct monitoring to vocalist’s headphones? I’ve tried to record vocalists today while using 3/4 Line input for mic (which is bad, I guess, isn’t it?) and they’re saying that backing track is superior to vocal in terms of levels (in headphones, yeah). I tweaked dspMixFx a little bit (added ANLG3’s level, lowered DAW level a little bit, activated Ch.Strip for MON.FX) and it helped greatly. But I’m still feeling not that comfortable about this and I would like to know more elegant solution to this if one exists.

Thank you so much, and please forgive me for my bad English.

With love from Russia. :wink: