Different Headphone Levels between Recording and Playback

[Cayce]

I need to find out why Pro Tools is giving me different levels between playback and recording. It happens consistently but is most apparent when I'm patching in a section, hearing the pre-roll audio, then when it comes time to record, my record level is so much lower than my playback, it's disconcerting, throwing me off. There's no logical reason for that to be happening, especially when there are no plugins involved in the record or playback.

Thanks.

[JFreak]

Ae your record and playback faders linked or not?

[Darryl Ramm]

There are multiple logical reasons this can happen, all of which you might well have excluded already.

If it's not the most obvious/common one that Janne mentioned then here are some other ideas. I'm not clear if you are tracking midi (since your other recent posts are about MIDI) or audio. Lets assume just audio to keep it simple.

It may be an effect of low latency monitoring... often defeating plugins... and you say there are no plugins, but if Low Latency Monitoring is also defeating sends then you may lose that signal, and even without plugins on the send just whatever additional signal that's providing. Just a good idea if it's enabled to try toggling off Low Latency Monitoring and compare the difference. Easy to make mistakes here with using sends to drive headphone mixes and then get stuff mixed up.

Another potential issue is interface hardware mixers providing the monitoring signal while tracking audio. The lower signal may be you are only hearing the hardware monitoring. Ot even in bizarre cases you have phase inversion of one of the hardware/software monitoring signals. If you have a hardware mixer and not intending to use if confirm it's completely disabled. Another diagnostic is to bump the IO buffer size as large as possible and you'll hear obvious delays between the software and hardware monitoring (or stick a horrible reverb or similar on the mixer if it supports effects and see if you hear that when not expecting to).