Nord User Forum

Hi everyone, I'm fairly new to Nord. I love my new Stage 2 EX, but one thing I've been frustrated with is when I want to play it through my studio monitors; I'm not getting great audio quality. At first I thought this might have been the interface I had with my computer. It was a TC Electronic Impact Twin but I recently replaced that with something higher quality - an Apollo Twin Duo Mk2. I don't understand how the audio quality is degraded so much in comparison to playing the Nord with my headphones vs. using the Ch1 out to an interface. It's really no different than with the TC Electronic. I've used the Nord at some live gigs before where I've plugged into the house mixer and it sounds great coming off the monitors. I've thought "Maybe it's just because I'm in a larger environment and they have bigger monitors than what I have in my studio?" But even if I connect my same headphones to the jack of the interface it's so much less clear than directly into the Nord's headphone jack. It doesn't make sense to me why this should be such a lousy signal. I get a better sound if I just connect the MIDI USB and play virtual instruments but I want to play the Nord sounds. Any tips/suggestions to help me understand this and fix it?

One suggestion would be to back off on your input levels to the audio interface. Many are intended for mic level inputs vs. hot line levels coming off the Nord. This would cause the sound to distort and saturate.

Yes, I have experimented with that, but it has not improved anything. I have the output from the Nord going into a Line level input on the interface. It's not that there's distortion, it just lacks clarity and presence. Like the quality of the sound is cut in half.

are you running in stereo?

if so, have you panned the channels left and right so you are not summing both channels to mono?

^ what he said. Make sure to pan channels 1 and 2 hard left and right. Interfaces usually have them all centered.

Did it work?

gakker_prod wrote:Did it work?

It must have, he hasn't followed up that post in three years.

I created a very similar post just recently about white noise and its exactly what the original post here describes. no problems on any instrument besides the electro with noise