More Recording Issues:Broken Fast Track

So I continue to be completely befuddled by my inability to track down the humming/feedback noise when I attempt to record. However, that has recently been trumped by the sudden random breakdown of my digital input device, the m-Audio Fast Track USB module.

When I turned my machine on the other day, it was outputting nothing but a loud white noise. Plugging in and removing any audio input made no difference. It was pretty much broken. So after waiting an hour on the phone for m-Audio's technical service, they sent me a form to use to ship the thing in for repair or replacement.

Before the unit broke, I attempted to determine the source of the humming through a few more experiments.

First, the noise goes away when I take the R3 out of the loop and plug my digital piano in both through audio and MIDI. This would appear to point the blame at the R3 and not the input device.

Second, I tried buying some ferrite magnet signal blockers to put on the USB cables which are supposed to block extraneous signals from the wires. I don't really understand what that means exactly other than to say it made no real difference.

Third, I tried changing the MIDI channel on the R3 at the suggestion of someone on the Korg boards. They said that certain channels produced a hum on his machine so he just had to avoid using them. No such luck with my own set-up.

Fourth, I tried out a few other recording programs. All other programs I have used have the same noise in the signal.

It's my best guess that the hum is feedback noise. I did some recording tests while recording blank audio (hitting record but not playing anything and just letting the software capture input noise.) In my first test, I only captured blank audio and get the high-pitched humming noise. In my second test, I captured blank audio while the internal program's metronome clicked. Playing it back I got a hum and a very faint echo of the metronome click. In my third test, I captured blank audio while playing back some other recorded tracks simultaneously. This and the metronome are absolutely necessary to be able to do multi-track recording. If I can't hear what I'm playing along with, I can't play in time nor know what I'm playing on the track. Sure enough, the third test captured the hum and the faint sound of the audio playback. That means every track I add will continue to add more muddy noise to the song I'm recording.

Last weekend we went into a Guitar Center to look at a few things and possibly talk to someone there who might be knowledgeable on recording and/or synthesizers. Unfortunately, the place was fairly crowded and I couldn't get a single person to talk to me. I doubt if I held a hand full of thousand dollar bills in the air and shouted "I want to buy something" that anyone would have even given me the time of day. However, I did see on their shelf another input device, the Lexicon Alpha a fairly cheap and equivalent version of the Fast Track unit I already have. If my replacement Fast Track doesn't fix the audio problems, I may try that unit instead to see once and for all if the problem exists with my synthesizer or with my input device.