@Harry A&H: My old recording system for the Qu32 was a plain old Dell Vostro1710 (build 2008!) with a 2GHz Pentium DualCore T5870 based on Intel chipset (with ICH8 USB controller) and a nVidia GeForce 8600M GS running Win7 Home Premium.
I’ve also used a similar plain old 2008 MacMini with 1.8GHz DualCore running OSX 10.7 but in the meantime I’ve switched to a more modern MacBook pro running natively Win10 when using for recording (which also works safe when booted in OSX).
The Phantom issue sounds like a potential thermal issue for me. Maybe I never encountered a problem since I always run from dSnake (no local Phantom supply) and have a small personal paranoia fan mounted underneath the desk (keeping temperatures about 10 degrees lower). I could redo my testing with several local channels sourcing phantom mics and DI boxes with fan turned off.
Hi Harry,
I’m running an self assembled Windows 7 Ultimate machine. The motherboard is an older Gigabyte GA-970A-D3, with an AMD FX-6300 CPU with a WD 7200 rpm Black edition drive. I’ve tried with both the evga geforce gtx 460 (P/N 768-p3-1360-TR) and an MSI GT 720 (P/N N720-1GD3HLP). I was using nvidia drivers 361.75 when I switched out for an ATI/AMD card. I can post the sysinfo file if you need this. This motherboard uses the SB950 southbridge and I did have the correct and updated USB/chipset drivers for it (Crimson 15.12). I am using two daws (Samplitude Pro X2 and Studio One 3.1) and both were giving me trouble. I tried in both the Etron USB 3.0 ports and the USB 2.0 ports with no change.
I changed the video card (to an old radeon 3450) and the distortion reduced drastically but periodically if I have the machine on for about 6-8 hours, it will distort sometimes (I can’t pinpoint to exact times). I also am using phantom power (but didn’t ever think that is a possibility) on chan. 7,8,9. (just trying to think of everything that might be relevant). To fix the distortion now, I have to quit the DAW and restart, this fixes it. Before I’d have to reboot after about 5-20 mins of use.
I have kept the firmware on the QU24 up to date as they came out.
It is nice to see that A&H are looking at this issue and thank you for your time!
I am running Windows 10 with Intel 7 Xeon chip, 64gb ram with a GA-X99-Sli Gigabyte Mother board.Cubase 6.5 as the DAW. QU-16 desk with upgraded firmware.
Firstly I had the GTX560 Ti as my graphics card which I then changed for a GT740 SC. The distorted noise happened with both of these cards. Then after reading the post by Philt80 - I changed my card again for an AMD R7 (370) and I have not had the distortion noise since. Completely gone.
Phantom power was not my issue as it wasn’t turned on. I don’t vocally record at home.
Oh no! I’ve turned this into a PC forum!
Don’t worry guys I’ve built more than my fair share…
It’s common to find conflicts with PCI Audio Interfaces and Graphics Cards, or Integrated Graphics hardware acceleration (such as NVIDIA’s PowerMizer software) hogging CPU load and real-time USB audio processes, but this is not usually with PCI(e) Graphics Cards causing issues with USB audio.
@autofahrn I’m not ruling it out, but I’m just not sure it is a thermal issue. If you could test and let us know this would help.
@philt80 when you reboot, are you rebooting both PC and mixer right away?
@vaughank1 this also helps point towards ruling out any thermal issue in the preamp stage.
Thanks all for your help.
I will do some overnight soak testing here early next week on a mac and a PC to see if I can replicate any issues.
Please keep me posted on your findings.
Thermal test already in progress since about 5 hours using this setup:
Qu32
Ch1-8 receive 4 stereo audio streams from a sequencer (Spectralis)
These four streams are routed into four FX units running reverbs (assuming these require most DSP performance)
Ch15-24 receive signals from 10 phantom powered mics and DI boxes
All 18 input streams are recorded and mixed on my plain old notebook (Intel Core2Duo/nVidia) running Win7 and Reaper
Mix sum is sent back live to channels 11&12 which I’m listening to
ASIO settings are minimum USB buffer and 64 Samples, providing a turnaround latency of about 2mSec, which is damn great.
I’ve decided to run with this critical ASIO setting since it pulls about 50% constant CPU load on my notebook and any user action results in slight audible clicks. Audio is clean when not touching anything, so errors should be noticed easily (hopefully).
My fans are off, dogbox is closed and DSP temperature is at about 70°C, case temperature at the rear sockets at 37°C.
This setup ran nicely until right now, where I too get this noise. Re-plugging USB instantly cures the issue.
I’ll continue testing with fans active, to reduce temperature. I’ll let you informed if this changes anything (I somehow doubt it). Then I reverted ASIO settings to more moderate values (I normally use largest buffers with 2048 Samples, since for live recording I’m not bothering with low latency).
Writing this I realized that everybody with issues should check (and probably post) the Qu ASIO settings.
45 minutes later: DSP temperature lowered to 62°C, case temperature at 31°C. Played well until right now, where buffers got out of sync again. So it should not be a temperature issue.
But I’ve noticed some HDD action right before the noise begun, so I continue testing with USB buffers set to Low and 128 Samples.
Changing ASIO settings immediately cured the issue.
Harry,
I only reboot my computer, I’ve never rebooted the QU when this happens. This fixes the distortion until it happens again. With the ATI gpu, I can simply close the DAW and open it again and it will fix it.
My ASIO settings could not get below 2048 samples without distortion. At 2048 it would last clean for about 20 mins. I would assume that changing the asio buffer settings actually clear the buffers and start fresh but I’m no expert in that. I tried every buffer setting there was I believe now my buffer setting is at 512 samples with my ATI card in and I get distortion after about 6-8 hours on a good day.
@philt80: I’d really expect stable operation at lower ASIO settings on your system. Did you try disabling networking for a test (both LAN and WiFi)?
Anyway, after seeing two more times broken audio with 128 Samples, I switched USB Buffers to standard and Samples to 256. Running stable for three hours now. Keep it running…
Final note: With these settings (Buffers Standard, 256 Samples) systen went well for another 6 hours, 9 in total.
From what I’ve observed here I think we may need to check in other directions as well. My (formerly retired) notebook carries is a rather pure installation, intended for live recordings only, so there is only little background activity. With lower buffer settings audio stability gets more sensitive to actions I do on the surface. Moving the mouse around already produced some clicks on lowest setting. Some background tasks may check for updates, optimize disks, scan for malware or similar, which make things worse. A bad driver for hard disk (i.e. software RAID) or network controller may be the culprit as well.
Even switching from nVidia to ATI does not always seem to cure the issue but only change the symptoms.
Always remember: Audio streaming via USB requires the driver to schedule and receive packets each 125µSec. This requires a well designed hardware and driver backend. Any driver which locks the system for a lengthy period (talking about fractions of a mSec here) may kill the audio stream.
Just to put this into context - when I was speccing hardware for data centre applications we had an issue with some WD drives on 3ware controllers.
They were RAID specified drives, but had a bug in the firmware that would occasionally lock up for a few clock cycles. That was enough for the controller to decide the disk had failed and drop it from the array.
Audio latency is at least as sensitive - my old recording machine (PCI ADAT cards) had, and still has I presume, a plain WinXP installation - but never touched a network - so no AV, no anything other than Audacity (ASIO compiled) and the FLAC encoder.
WD did release a fix - but that required removing the disks and booting them in a PC without a raid card AND it failed to increment the version number.
So you couldn’t tell whether a disk had been patched or not, and couldn’t reasonably path the ones in service around the world. I was not happy with that fix!
A thought: Check to see if Windows has Indexing enabled for the drive. I’ve read in other recording and live audio forums that the drive indexing done by Windows for its search engine can use up some resources. I could be wrong (and welcome any correction) but it is my understanding that Windows Indexing causes the OS to occasionally check the drive for changes, and this could interrupt some other drive activity.
I’ll always turn off indexing right after OS installation, so I obviously missed to mention that. Yes, indexing indeed should be turned off on a DAW system.
Ahhh - Hey Ho!!
And the crackling/distortion is back with a vengeance.
I have honestly tried everything. It immediately disappears if you change the buffer settings between standard/low and minimum, but only for a short while.
Seriously considering getting a proper PC DSP Hammerfall Soundcard which I am confident will stop the problem. Sad thing is - i was persuaded into buying the QU-16 because I was told that the soundcard inside was of fantastic quality and there was no need for an internal pc soundcard. It was simple plug and play.
That was clearly poor advice and i am now of the conclusion that the QU-16 soundcard and system is totally inadequate and cannot cope with home programming/recording at high end level. And - as it also has no digital inputs or outputs, only USB Host - that leaves me with another problem.
A bit poor really!!
and - as I read above, no-one including A&H have any reasonable solution or resolve.
There is no reasonable solution since the issue obviously only happens on particular systems. There are many users around, including myself, who are using the Qu for recording in studio and live situations without any issue (both QuDrive and DAW Streaming).
Several issues already could be solved within the forum, some are still unclear.
PC installations may be rather complex and difficult to diagnose from remote. If increasing buffer sizes does not help, I’m pretty sure the culprit is somewhere else and not located in your audio configuration. Maybe a hidden USB hub inside the PC, maybe some bad (non-audio) driver, maybe some other USB device, maybe some bad setting inside the DAW, etc., difficult to tell.
In which case - i’d be very happy for you to visit my home in Blackpool and see if you can remedy the issue. Because it actually prevents me from working!! - I’ll even put you up!!
I guess I’ll try anything to get rid of this problem - which I’ve never had before, except only with the QU-16.
VK-
The Qu-16 is working well for me as a soundcard. I’ve been recording with it daily for over a year. I’m using a Macbook Air and Logic. I did have some distortion issues one day and I’m wondering if you can see if your problem is related to having the phantom power engaged for a long while. It’s a shot in the dark, I’m not technically minded, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
I hope you’re still reading this thread. I know you’re not the only one with recording troubles. There have been A & H representatives at this forum trying to troubleshoot this. I believe this problem is difficult to track down.
