I am recording various sound tracks across my different synthesizers of which all of them are Roland except for my Yamaha MU-50. I am monitoring the output as I record and, although I have experienced the occasional crackle or pop on a Roland synthesizer that required a track to be replayed, I am having an extremely difficult time with my MU-50. The theme song for EverQuest is especially problematic and I have made at least 20 recordings or more now and all of them have some kind of defect. I was able to make great recordings on my Roland devices with an output volume of 50%. This equated to about 83% on the Yamaha but this seemed to exacerbate the problem. I am now recording at about 25% volume which seems to help but there are still crackles and pops that occur which seem to be unrelated to the actual volume set by the dial.

There is always additional headroom after recording and I apply a normalization pass to ensure that all recordings have a consistent volume. This causes other strange problems with the Yamaha where it creates sounds which appear to be clipping when the waveform is still well within tolerance. This effect seems to appear at random between recordings.

Has anyone else experienced this problem with their synthesizers?

I've attached some examples along with the MIDI file I am playing.