Crackling Noise

[Sticks]

Good Evening

I've been using JKZ since last August but since upgrading to the silver plan I get an horrendous crackling noise to the point that JKZ is unusable for me.

My setup is:
AT2020 mic + Stagg XLR cable
Behringer UMC22 + USB 2.0
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)  2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5  8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
MacOS Big Sur 11.2.3

Instrument is a Hammer Dulcimer, so High attack and long sustain

I originally used a SM57 mic and older lead, but bought the new mic & lead when I started having this crackling sound issue, thinking they might be the cause as both were quite old.  However this changed nothing.

I noticed that the crackling seemed to pulsate in volume so wondered if this was something to do with the audio processing.  I found if I connected my earphones to the laptop rather than the interface (setting up the audio profile accordingly) the crackling reduced considerably, but I now cannot find a combination of gain and output volume which enables me to play along with anyone - if I turn myself up so that they can hear me, then I am deafened.

I have very little technical knowledge of audio matters, but if anyone can suggest where I might be going wrong it would be much appreciated.

Hi ARMCL,

I had the same issue when playing an acoustic drum kit.

The solution was very simple in my case, I took my drum kit out of my personal JK mix (volume zero). Since the noise of the acoustic drums was bleeding into my headphones already this was not a deal breaker for me. Then I lowered the JK mix volume in my headphones until the overall mix from JK and my acoustical bleeding drum kit was at an acceptable level.
You could try to do the same with your hammer dulcime since this instrument creates some good volume too. Maybe it works.......