well if you’re trying to do some kind of precise CV stuff with the audio signal for sure, but if you just want to run into the inputs of a eurorack filter or effect it is more than enough. and agree totally about sucking some of the original signal away. it definitely colours the sound
Maybe I’m being stupid (always possible haha) but I feel like all you’d be doing is pushing it to 0db if it wasn’t already there, its not going to get anywhere near Euro levels - unless the outputs put out more than line level?
@vasidudu I was frustrated that we were still discussing it so I pulled my gear apart and tested - unfortunately it seems that @Supercolor_T-120 is correct - the THRU VOL is just a volume after all, the signal still comes in hot, and isn’t attenuated like a gain control, which is a bummer!
So external attenuation is required after all. I run my euro out of my Intellijel case which brings it down to line level so it’s never been an issue for me.
A shame as that’s not how mixers work, OT is cheating a bit.
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oops meant to reply instead of edit: 0db is just unity, output voltage varies depending on peak to peak max dbu
sir get a loudness meter 
even works on your phone. 0db will be a different volume on everything
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How I feel right now
Edit: OK yea I guess this makes more sense, I must admit I’m still a bit confused this is clearly not my expertise 
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If anyone cares: I went with Befaco outs, they have integrated prelistening option. Quite zufrieden. Can recommend them.
Thänks & co!
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As it happens I’m selling a Befaco Output v3 right now !
Head on over to Nate’s Eurorack emporium 
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I don’t think the OP wants to go back into the Eurorack system from the OT outputs. What I got from the original post was Eurorack -> OT -> interface or mixer. In that case, you would attenuate the Eurorack output (including its noise floor) by 80%-90% to det it down to a good level for the OT, which should also put the noise floor well below the OT’s own noise floor. After that, everything’s line level. The more you boost the signal AFTER the OT, the more you’re raising the OT’s noise floor (and lowering the dynamic range), so ideally you would have the levels coming out of the OT hot enough that you don’t need much gain (if any) to have a good level for recording or running to a PA or whatever. Going back in to Eurorack is a whole other scenario.
In either case, with modern equipment the noise floor is probably going to be low enough that it won’t matter. If the noise floor in the Eurorack system is high enough that it still matters after it’s been brought down to line level then there’s something wrong.
All I’ve been saying is that the farther down your signal path you boost the more accumulated noise you will be boosting, so it’s better to hit the inputs of the OT with the hottest signal you can get away with and boos the outputs as little as possible on their way to your interface/speakers. Gainstaging inside the OT is a whole different thing (the 24 bit noise floor is almost irrelevant, and clipping a fixed point digital signal usually sounds a lot worse than clipping an op amp or something, so internally it’s good to leave a decent amount of headroom as long as you can still keep your output levels hot enough). The only reasons I mentioned the internal gain structure at all is that since the OT pads the inputs by 12db digitally you can push the inputs pretty close to clipping and still have plenty of internal headroom, and also there were a couple spots where people mentioned digital level controls that wouldn’t actually help in the OP’s case because a eurorack signal needs to be brought down to line level BEFORE it reaches the OT’s converters, and the only way to do that on the OT itself is in the record setup menu as far as I know.
It really does just boil down to “every piece of gear in a chain adds ssome noise,and all else being equal the farther down the chain you’re boosting the signal, the higher the noise floor at the end of the chain will be.”
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Nice, I have an older Intellijel stereo output and it also works well (although I got rid of most of my eurorack stuff a year or two ago because I just never clicked with the format and only really use what’s left of my setup as a spring reverb unit). A friend I play with sometimes had a lot of Befaco stuff for a while and it all seems to be quite good.
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Yes, that was what I wanted. Solved with eurorack->line module.
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all theory aside in practice and from actual specifications from Elektron, regardless of how you think you should be gain staging anything the OT needs external amplification to bring it close to the level of other gear. I don’t have much more to say beyond that lol
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I’m happy with Befaco stuff. Never encountered stuff like chhhhhhrrrrrzzzz while turning the knobs…
Can’t describe it better, but there is no noise while fiddling. Had 4ms ins and outs too, but those… i wasn’t that happy.
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my personal weapons of choice for ins and outs… wmd performance mixer dsub out and the transformer balanced TAI-4 by vermona.
this all leads to here so nice and easy routing
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Using a 4ms Listen4 and quite happy with it.
2 mono INs and 2 stereo INs. Has modular or line switch (pretty handy if you want to use as a sub mixer with other modular). Only downside is size. 10hp…
Using OT Mk2 as a basic mixer/sample player.
The issue I have (reason why I was asking going straight from modular to OT) is I cannot sample independantly either voice from modular without muting other voices.
Using Torso T-1 to sequence modular. OT sending clock to T-1 and modular.
Have a Befaco MIDI Thing (MIDI to 4 cv/gates) which I like.
Still figuring out if I will bypass OT to go full modular. Managing 2 external sequencers is overkill for me 
Edit: thinking about it… I could go out from modular into a Behringer 1602 (which I have) then into OT. Through it’s send (Mono though…), I could select which voice I want to sample/loop in OT. Mono though…
Edit 2: also own a MOTU UltraLite Mk3. I know these are DC coupled. Does that mean it would accept modular levels? If that is the case, I could route my modular and have a CueMix setup to route the INs of the MOTU to it’s OUTs into OT…
Has anyone ever confirmed that you can’t use the ANALOG input gain (the one in the mixer menu, I don’t know what I was thinking in those earlier posts saying it was the the one in track recorder setup) to bring a modular signal down to line level?
I have a MKI and the headroom is way lower than Eurorack, but the MKII manual says the headroom is +17dBu, which is 15v peak to peak and should be more than enough to handle a raw Euro signal. Maybe all you need to do is turn down the input gain in the mixer to avoid clipping the ADC, but I don’t have access to a MKII to test with (and most of my modules were already traded or given away last year)
yea MOTU interfaces are dc coupled inputs and outputs! this would be a wonderful solution. You might get a tiny bit of latency routing through the motu but i don’t think it will be too bad
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DC coupling doesn’t make any difference for levels, but what it DOES mean is that you can use it to send and recieve control voltages without problems. All it really means is that the signals aren’t highpassed like they are on most inputs and outputs, so if you send a fixed voltage or an LFO it won’t get filtered out (most gear filters out anything subsonic or DC, because if you send that stuff to your monitors there’s a prety good chance the woofers will blow).
Yesterday I actually found this handy table for converting betwen dBu, dBV, RMS voltage and peak voltage:
http://www.uneeda-audio.com/images/dbtbl.pdf
You can use that to check a piece of gear’s nominal headroom against Eurorack’s nominal output voltage and see how safe it is to connect unattenuated modular signals to it. +14dBu or higher should be fine. Lower than that might work if you lower the gain on your inputs, but you’d probably be better off using some kind of attenuator or output module just to be on the safe side.
On papoer, the OT MKI doesn’t have enough headroom for a full 10v p-p signal, but the MKII has more than enough.
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there’s a pad on the inputs 
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The -12db pad is digital.
Lowering the input gain in the mixer page should work fine with the MKII, but I don’t know what the topology of the analog section is on the MKI and don’t ahve any eurorack stuff handy to test with, so I’m not sure if it will work. Lowering the gain would keep it from clipping the converters, but for a signal that’s almost 10dBu hotter than the MKI 's ceiling it might still distort in the analog stages even with the gain down. I’d hope that it would be able to handle the extra 5v gracefully enough to not actually damage anything but you never know.
But the MKII should be fine with 10v p-p as long as the gain’s low enough.
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I’m talking about the 20db pad on the ultralight that I was replying to sir lol you are over complicating things and missing the point 
remember this is about the OPs quest with their current gears. I will always advise to try what you have before buying new things
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Sorry, thought it was a response to me.
Not really overcomplicating things, all I’ve said in this thread is “you should be safe connecting Eurorack levels directly to a MKII, but with a MKI it might be smart to attenuate them first.”
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