trying to eliminate hiss-need better vocals

[moduledom]

hey guys. so,, I've been building and updating my recording setup. I'm having issues with an overload of hissing through my control room speakers and it seems to be be recording with hiss as well. I have the setup running as a loop so I can get a qmix in the headphones. I thought getting a pre amp would give me ****er vox but instead I've been getting hissing and more tin-mid range on my vocal tracks. it's driving me crazy.. I'm going to seperate all the equipment individually to see what the problem is but I'm guessing that the maudio firewire 410 is the problem. I gather that it's a pretty crappy sound card. I'm thinking about purchasing a motu.. any advice would greatly be appreciated. trying to eliminate hiss and get ****er thicker vocals. please help... thanks
dom-

gear I'm using

macbook pro 2.6
logic 8
event powered monitors 20/20
mackie vlz 802 mixer,
maudio 410 firewire card
rode nt1a
presonus tube pre

[Audio~Geek]

cheap tube preamps are more trouble than good. better off ditching it.
They aren't designed to be clean, they are designed to distort easily and be inexpensive.

Simplify the signal path
Rode mic directly into the firewire 410

[moduledom]

thanks for the reply.. I played with the routing and solved the problem after a tip my friend gave me. The presonus is a great single input tube mic. I just don't have the funds to get anything better right now so it'll do. It accentuates and ****s the level much better than just having the 410. The 410 doesn't have enough signal gain to get a good reording without background noise unless I were to use the pad. When I'd use the pad it would be to low in the q mix so I needed to bump it up. When I use the pad now with the preamp I'm surprised at the how awesome of a signal I'm getting. I could only imagine how much better the signal flow would be if I had a better preamp. I'll work with this for now and see how it goes. Thanks again for your time. best
dom-