I have been moving forward and doing the normal isolation steps, debug, logging, etc…
I am being quite patient with the process, the frustration is that I shouldn’t be having this issue.
I’ve been through this process many, many times before.
I am a tech by profession working with electronics, software, and integration.
I’ve been a gear freak for about 23 years now and you know I really haven’t had this much problems
with much gear/driver integration in such a long time now. I am moving forward and will find a solution.
I just never expected to approach this console with this type of problem.
I do not like to have to do my day job when I just spent a bunch of money and want to play and be creative.
That’s why I am frustrated.
I appreciate your response, and not trying to be frustrated toward you at all. I will get there.
Well, there are more components than just the console, and having some familiarity with Microsoft and Apple I would hesitate to place the blame on any one specific piece of gear at the start as approaching a problem a priori is counter to objectivity in the problem solving process. Odds are, though, if there is one link in the chain allowing or requiring user configuration, that’s the likely culprit.
Don’t think I’m laying out a diagnosis when I say that others have ended up switch GFX drivers/cards. It’s more an illustration of just how unrelated the things that can cause issues really look.
Well I am finding some research promising at the moment.
Did some USB packet captures identifying some drops, but not specifically in-sync with the noise error.
Hopefully some tests early this morning will reveal some answers, or at least isolate this possible issue.
Regarding Intel’s later USB controllers, there is a known issue in the spec where Intel describes that software can perform a workaround or the problem should not be noticeable.
. USB Isoch In Transfer Error Issue
Problem: If a USB full-speed inbound isochronous transaction with a packet length 190 bytes or
greater is started near the end of a microframe the PCH may see more than 189 bytes
in the next microframe.
Implication: If the PCH sees more than 189 bytes for a microframe an error will be sent to software
and the isochronous transfer will be lost. If a single data packet is lost no perceptible
impact for the end user is expected.
Note: Intel has only observed the issue in a synthetic test environment where precise control
of packet scheduling is available, and has not observed this failure in its compatibility
validation testing.
• Isochronous traffic is periodic and cannot be retried thus it is considered good
practice for software to schedule isochronous transactions to start at the beginning
of a microframe. Known software solutions follow this practice.
• To sensitize the system to the issue additional traffic such as other isochronous
transactions or retries of asynchronous transactions would be required to push the
inbound isochronous transaction to the end of the microframe.
I am believing that I can disable XHCI, and correct for this issue, however in the same I will be disabling all of the USB 3.0 ports. If this proves to be right, then a secondary USB controller might help the issue, without A&H doing a workaround in their isochronous delivery.
I believe a lot of people’s problems relating to “noise” electrical sounding problems is possibly because of what I had stated above.
I would like to hear if anyone experiencing these issues are using a different chipset than Intel on their setup.
The answer looks to be the XHCI implementation and what information I have above.
I disabled XHCI in my bios and performed about a 20-30 minute test pushing the audio.
Using Sonar before I was able to switch quickly different loops in the media browser and almost always make the issue come up.
Switching to another loop would correct this issue.
In my tests post-disabling XHCI implementation, I could no longer repeat the issue and believe this might be the number one cause of this problem.
I hope my information helps!
Now regarding my motherboard USB 3.0 connections, I have not yet to look at and see if they are available or not.
I am not sure if A&H want to put a work-around in their drivers/firmware?
If possible this might prevent end-users from running into this problem and having to disable XHCI.
I am forwarding this information to my ticket to let A&H know.
I have this issue on a computer with an NVIDIA chipset, but I’m not positive if the USB is Intel. Probably not. I’ll check this coming weekend and report back.
I have two other Macs (both circa early 2012 I believe) that had the same issue initially and suddenly stopped having it. I never found out what the problem may have been, but I suppose it could have been a driver update by Apple that happened unknowingly that fixed it.
Yeah Nvidia I don’t believe ever handle the chipsets on motherboards for usb peripherals, just typically the GPU side of the house.
In a lot of cases I know that Intel has been widespread even through Mac and through various different MB.
What Motherboard is it?
So looking at the Era of Macs that you described. They completely switched over to Intel at least for all of their CPU.
Still looking for information on the peripheral chipset. I see a lot of people using Mac talking about installing Intel drivers versus the “Apple” OEM intended drivers as well.
So there was a phase out period where the southbridge was basically integrated directly into the CPU.
I am not for sure your model of Mac but regardless it almost looks like most all the controllers used by Mac are Intel.
Quite possibly a driver update did fix this issue.
Years back NVIDIA for a short time did create chipsets (including North and Southbridges) for AMD processors. I think the laptop that is having the issue might have one of those chipsets in it. But I’m not sure if NVIDIA designed any USB controllers themselves. I’ll have to look at it this weekend though because I don’t have it in my possession.
Yea, the two Macbook Pro’s I was referring to are Intel-based. I believe they started that whole transition around 2006. One of them is my personal laptop so I’ll check that out too later tonight.
@sephult, thanks very much for your time trouble shooting this and for posting your solution! I had given up on USB-B recording as I’d tried all of the suggested solutions with no success (short of replacing components as some seem to have done). I made your suggested bios change, ran a 20 minute test audio recording and didn’t have one noise issue!! I’m not doing any live recordings till January so I’ll test again then but at this point I’m very happy, thanks!!
@sephult OK, so my Mac that started working has an Intel 6/C200 EHCI controller which only supports USB 2.0. I know the Windows laptop (the NVIDIA one) is older and only has USB 2.0 as well, so I won’t find an XHCI option in the BIOS. So the problem you found only happens with XHCI controllers?
I am not completely knowledgeable on XHCI.
It looks like the specification was as early as 2009.
I couldn’t find much more information on where it was used first or applied.
Who knows what the interaction could be, the driver issues with controllers…etc…
My path led me to the frame issue, and more so onto the XHCI so I really don’t have enough detailed information on if and how they can interact, or quite possibly there is something other-related that is the issue.
It could be the way that the driver/firmware for the QU-32 is just more susceptible to different cases as well, and XHCI and this possible framing clue could somehow be related to having the ability to push that boundary.
At this point, I can help others…but not worth time digging much deeper finding the root cause or learning the XHCI/Specs on my part.
I started looking back making sure your and my case too was similar. Yes I finally found your sample audio and this is the issue I was running into as well.
So send me your computer configurations and I will look into them and see if I can find anything further.
I am scouring trying to find any other relative information on the top-level. If you get me more details maybe we can also find out what your cause is and/if somewhat related…
Yeah mine has worked perfect since… as well too!
I did get a message back from A&H, I am very surprised this isn’t a pinned topic…or there isn’t more info in their faq regarding this issue.
Send me a T-Shirt A&H, come on I’d Rock that! haha
Just a thank you for passing the incredibly useful information to them and thoroughness in what I did …etc…
I usually get paid for doing that, not pay for something to do it on…lol
No hard feelings, love the Qu-32 and I am glad I could help out the community as well…that is the biggest thing to me.
Would be cool like I said if they put in their pinned troubleshooting, or faq…as it seemed it was almost 6 months or more with people that had no answers…hmm two days or three days…come on where is that T-Shirt…lol
Hi,i my self also have that electri noise via playback(daw,you tubr,itunes…)i m usinh a macbook pre mid 2014 2,2 ghz intel core I7,graphics intel iris pro 1536 mb with my A&H qu24…how do i get rid of that ugly sound. plase help.
thank you
!