Mic through Preamp and into an RCA input?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Mic through Preamp and into an RCA input?

Hey everyone,

let me explain you the situation. i want to perform live with vocals and soft synths
through ableton. so therefore i need some good sounding and loud preamps and an
audio interface with low latency.

right now i’ve got a focusrite saffire 6 which has really good preamps but
the round trip latency i get with it is around 18ms at 128 samples and thats kinda
bothering me. so i was thinking about getting another soundcard. i thought about
the NI komplete audio 6 because it seems to have a very good latency performance
but i’ve read alot, that the preamps have very low volume.

so i dont really know. i researched a lot and just couldnt find the right interface.

i am on a very low budget and cant really go over 200€. i buy everything 2nd hand anyway.
so maybe something older which used to be expensive and good and is cheap now would also
be fine.

so i was thinking to maybe get back my NI audio 4 dj which i had before the focusrite and
maybe buy an outboard preamp and run it into the RCA inputs of the audio 4 dj.

but i dont really know if that would make much sense or would be a reasonable thing to do.
but if it works, maybe i get better results this way.

that it. some advice would be very nice. :slight_smile:

2

You should be able to use the Saffire 6’s preamps in Direct Thru mode, by turning the MIXER dial fully left towards Input. You can then feed the RCA/TRS outputs into a lower latency sound card.

3

Is there a particular reason you need to route the mic through software, Glint Eye?

The standard practice for live sound is to avoid doing that altogether, and route the mic directly to FOH, perhaps with hardware effects in the chain.

4

hey mojaxx

i want to use abletons looper and some fx and hardware gear would be too expensive.

makar1, that sounds like a good idea, but then i would be using the saffire 6 just as a preamp and still need a 2nd soundcard.
so maybe i could get some good used preamps and run it into the rca line inputs of the audio 4 dj (which i would have to buy again).

but my all in all question was also if that would be working, to go from an xlr output of some preamp into an rca input, with an xlr to rca adapter, or maybe that wouldnt work or it would sound bad or something. i’ve never done it and i wanted to see what people here would say to that.

5

The Saffire 6 has RCA outs so you don’t need to bother with adapters.