Problems (and solutions) from the world of loop: metronome bleed

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

Dear fellow loopers,

just thought I'd share a problem I encountered with my laptop-based 
looping setup and the solution to it.

A quick rundown of the setup: laptop running Mobius within Ableton Live!, 
a Presonus Firebox fed by both a headset microphone (into Ch2) and a 
guitar or bass (into Ch1), the main outs either via 1/4'' TRS (on the 
Firebox' 1/2 output pair) or coax S/PDIF (output 7/8). A pair of 
headphones (Sony earplugs) routed from output 3/4 within the Firebox, 
which in turn is fed by Live's cue channel.

The problem: when I played guitar or bass and looped it while listening to 
Live's metronome, the metronome was clearly audible in the loop. When it 
appeared for the first time and I found it when listening back to the 
recording, I thought I accidently left the mic channel open and routed to 
Mobius, but it happened a second time (and I hereby want to say sorry both 
to Krispen and Rick, who were part of these performances).

After careful research of the problem, it presented itself like this: the 
headphones' cable was obviously bleeding into the guitar cable. Now the 
guitar cable wasn't a really cheap one (but not one of those well above 
$100 ones, either), which can't be said about the headphone cables (very 
thin).

Solution: I took my Behringer DI20 active DI (which I bought once "just in 
case" and left it in one of my "small pieces of gear" drawers since then - 
they go for below €30 and according to the relevant forums (gearslutz, 
recording.org) are a great bang for the buck), connected it with an XLR 
cable to the firebox' ch1 and the DI in turn to the guitar's output with a 
short patch cable. No more mic bleeding; problem solved. The guitar sound: 
seems to be at least as good as before.

        Rainer