Do Voyagers have a built-in lower mids spectrum peak?

[samplethesilence]

I've owned a Voyager RME for 2 years, and have only just recently solved a problem: It was clipping the digital inputs of the audio interface with what seemed to be insufficient volume. Keeping amp sustain high and using digital limiting on the recording only seemed to help a little.

Couple this with the odd and rather annoying character of my Voyager to never really seem to sound bright until nearly reaching maximum cutoff.

As it turns out, the best thing to do, to solve both of these, seems to be to notch the sweepable mid-EQ on the channel strip by -6db at around 600 hertz.

That brightness is made more clear, so one isn't necessarily forced to turn up the volume to hear it, and the Voyager sounds a bit more natural. So I'm wondering if something in the signal path of the Voyager is producing a +3-6db peak around the 600 hz area. This seems to only apply to when the internal oscillators are in use, and not when I only run signals through it, so that may be a hint. It also doesn't seem to matter if the Mix-Insert is connected or not.

While I've got your attention, maybe someone can answer this:
Why is it that the Pedal Amount does nothing until it reaches +12? Is my Voyager in need of calibration? I often use it on leads to send smoothed S+H to Osc2 to fake pitch drift, and +12 is a hair too much. Shaping doesn't seem to help. And no, I don't have the VX expanders yet.