[The Telenator]

DAWs will process and record up to 64-bit float these days. Check out the Prefs page and the Podium guide. Tonnes of headroom and extremely low noise floor, along with all the fidelity you could ever want. A lot of plugins process at 64 internally nowadays as well.

Your coming in on an amp’s line out (nice you have some level control there) is not the worst scenario. At least you have a little umph in the signal. We had a guy here recently who decided to give some guitar playing a go in Podium, and we soon figured out he was plugging the guitar into the PC’s Line In on the back of his tower with no amplification to the signal at all. He wrote in stating that the guitar sounded anemic and not quite loud enough. Passive pickups, of course, and no wonder!

Yeah, I wouldn’t mind hearing a clip from that amp model. Didn’t you say it was their acoustic guitar amp model?

Polarity. Ground Loops. Sometimes in a dwelling the outlets are wired by an idiot electrician, and it is not unusual to have one outlet where the ground isn’t wired up, or more subtle yet just as potentially dangerous, the dolt reversed the phase because he was letting his mind wander. One of those $3 yellow outlet testers can save your life. But on a less serious but almost as important note, you want to try to run amp, gadgets, PC and what have you from your signal chain out of the same properly wired outlet. Run your amp from a different outlet from across the room, and it may be out of phase with the one your DAW PC is using, resulting in huge noise and hum. Extremely annoying and impossible to record anything under that circumstance.