DOH!!! I think I overloaded my Toneport. I'm stupid. Please advise...

I am a DICK. I was trying to record a young band today, using Reaper on my laptop with a Line6 UX8 interface. The bass player only had a bass head with her, no cab, so I thought that's fine, I'll record the signal from the head and use cab modelling on it. Not being very familiar with amp heads etc, I THOUGHT I connected a line out signal from the head to a line in on my UX8. Looks like it wasn't a line out through, presumably a much higher level designed to drive cabs? The reason I say this is because a thin haze of SMOKE began to emanate from the top of my UX8, soon accompanied by a funny smell. I quickly turned the thing off and unplugged it. See, I know my way round a home recording setup and Reaper and all that jazz, but I'm not so familiar with heads, cabsand their connections. Nor do I know much about electronics. Plus, basically, I just had a temporary absence of common sense. Here are my questions, please advise! - was I indeed massively overloading the channel on the UX8? - might I consider it safe to turn back it back on to see if it's OK? It didn't actually blow, it was still on - and the smoke didn't happen for long. Maybe I might just have damaged one channel? Maybe it might miraculously still work? - should I not turn it on under any circumstances, but refer to an electrician, or get Line6 to fix it? - am I as stupid as I feel? Would be great to get any advice on this please folks... Cheers! Alex

Shit dude. Well... that just sucks. I can't really think of anything else to add to D's comments! Make the band pay for it. Tell them it happened because the amp was faulty. Besides, their parents probably will buy them more gear anyway. :D PS - All of the above is a joke. Just trying to get a laugh out of such a shitty situation! GOOD LUCK DUDE!!! :(

Well it seems like I might have been relatively lucky. I've just tried the UX8 at home and it seems to entirely work ... EXCEPT for the one input on the one channel which I connected wrongly. That input now has a funny noise on it and records too quietly. The other inputs for that channel (XLR and instrument) seem to be fine. Gonna test it some more later but I think I've learnt an important lesson at hopefully minimum expense...

So... what we REALLY want to know: Was the band any good?!

Ha! Well they are 18-yr-old punky funsters, not bad... shame I managed to bugger the session just before we were about to record... but things have been reschedulized, and hopefully I'll plug things in the right places next time.

Dude... glad you didn't fry your interface. I think I would have gone insane.