Recording Phatty with Apogee Duet 2

[dmunz]

Recording Newb here. Recording direct into Apogee Duet 2. Which is the best way to record:

A TRS to XLR cable to record at line level -10 dBV
A TRS to XLR cable to record at line level +4 dBu
A TRS to XLR cable to record at mic level
A regular 1/4 in instrument cable at instrument level

[grailtone]

I'm using a regular instrument cable with the interface set to "instrument" with the gain all the way down...Sounds fine, and I have plenty of headroom for high resonance sweeps and making kicks/snares.

[grailtone]

Instrument level w/instrument cable has been fine for me! I just kept the gain down all the way.

[mico]

I own the legacy Apogee Duet (firewire) and while it has truly become a lackluster piece of gear since upgrading to Lion, I used to find, when using Snow Leopard, that adding just a tad bit of gain provided a great warmth during AD conversion. Now, however, there are many issues that exasperate me to no end.

It probably wouldn't be such a big deal if Apogee didn't take down the DuetUninstaller file so that I can try a fresh install now that I'm on Lion, but their support suffers in spite of the utter quality of their hardware.

To answer the OP, despite us using different hardware, I found the TRS to XLR yielded no sonic benefits to a standard instrument cable. This is coming from an strong audiophile.