I think I'm following the forum rules here, and I suspect this may by a user issue as I have very little experience with any recording technology so I have not yet contacted technical support.
With AT5, many of the presets and models I create sound fine when I am playing live and testing the sound out, but once I record, it sounds distant and washed out or muffled. To be clear it is NOT the crackling or distorting that you'd get with buffer or processing issues, and it's not an issue with volume/playback level.
I don't think it has anything to do with my guitar/interface or input because it sounds perfectly fine when playing, it's only upon playback, and only with certain amp setups. I have tried everything I can think of, including taking a factory preset that has the problem and manually replicating it precisely to try and narrow down where I'm going wrong, but I can't figure it out.
It does seem to be more common with clean setups, but some clean ones sound fine on playback and some gainier ones have the issue.
The problem happens both in stand-alone AT5 and using in Cakewalk. Adjusting AT5 input and output (the ones in the bottom left and bottom right) don't seem to impact the issue. I've gone through and adjusted every setting with pedals, effects, amp, mic, speaker, EQ etc. that I can find.
I don't think this is the problem because I otherwise have not experienced any issues, but I have been using active pickups, and have not tried passive, but again, everything seems to work fine with most of the amp models and setups, and the live sound is perfectly fine. Using a UA Volt 276, but again, see prior sentence. I haven't had any similar issues using any other VSTs/plugins or in any other contexts.
Any help is much appreciated - my knowledge level with all of this is very limited, so there very well could be something basic I am overlooking with either the software or fundamentals of recording.
