Hi All!
Recently snagged a digitone and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I’m relatively new to the hardware synth world and wanted to confirm that the stereo outs on the digitone are line level. After searching the forum, I can indeed see that’s the case! However, for future reference, how can I make sure that a piece of gear outputs at line level (as opposed to instrument level)?
Just hook it up to your interface and take a look at what’s coming out.
Also “Instrument Level” generally refers to things like guitars, or other low-gain devices. Most synths are around line level, give or take. Modular synths are even hotter, unless you’re using a dedicated output module to bring things down to line level.
Thanks for the response! Can you elaborate a bit? Do you mean the signal level going into the interface?
Yeah I mean basically everything is going to fall in a certain range of “line level” (or higher than line level like with modular as was said above) if it’s a synth or drum machine etc with internal amplification, and everything has its own volume control so the amount of signal from any given piece of gear is going to have a pretty large range. TBH it’s not really something you need to think about too much, unless you’ve got a piece of outboard with a selectable level switch like -10db/-20db, and you can just set your interface to zero gain and turn the volume on whatever piece of gear until you see signal, and if you get to 90% on the volume knob and your signal is very low still, increase the the gain on your interface a bit. You just wanna keep your noise low in relation to the signal, just play around and you can see the levels of everything in the software your interface comes with, or a DAW, so you’ll know how to set the level switch on outboard based on the levels you see.