Qu-32 USB-B Streaming Produce Robotic Noise

Qu Qu Troubleshooting
41

I have streamed off and on into win7 over the past few years sometimes for a week doing projects.
That was in the non bi-directional days and I have never a problem. That was a Dell laptop 3 years old i7 with 8 gig Ram. Hardly a racehorse laptop.

I can make my iMACs go wrong [i7 8 gig Ram 2012 model] [and bring on a robotic sound and audio actually jump tracks] but thats only by making the processors work harder than what they are probably designed for?
And the way I did that was streaming with a lot of plugins in the destructive mode where you are recording through the plugins.

This is just discussion! Not intended for any other purpose.

42

Umm… this is a support forum so people are generally going to be ticked off and I completely agree with them. Since this is the troubleshooting forums that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone chatting here. I believe it is designed to get stuff worked out and pass around “what worked” ideas to those who are facing issues. If somebody is pissed off, its at the board not the brotha!
What worked for my robotic noise (and trust me I tried EVERYTHING - I’m an I.T. support specialist and a recording hobbyist), was to switch my motherboard out. I believe the issue was in the southbridge chip which runs the flow of USB information. I went from an AMD 970 chipset to an intel H97 chipset. After this I did not get any robotic noise. Of course this doesn’t help anyone with other intel chips that are still having issues but this is the only thing that fixed mine (I kept everything else the same… video, memory, HDD, usb cables etc). My conclusion it has something to do with the southbridge chipset. If models are needed I can supply.
Keep on troubleshooting!
Philt80

43

This solution worked perfectly for me (disabling xHCI in the bios)

44

So it’s been more than a year and they don’t even have the honesty to warns us when we buy a console that USB 3.0 is broken? This is kind of important because I bought it to be the interface of my studio…

The official answer I got was that Intel messed the xHCI drivers and when I went to Intel they don’t seem to care much about the issue…

Any other hardware manufacturer having this problem with their consoles ?

So what the … is going on ?

Time to put more pressure on them an go public?

45

I have difficulty understanding how a console manufacturer can be blamed for third party changes in outboard devices. It’s just not rational. Terribly disappointing, yes, but not logical. Intel is the “responsible party” in this case…or “irresponsible party” if you prefer.

My approach has been to avoid using multi-purpose “all things to all people” gear like laptops and such, recording instead directly to a stand-alone hard drive, then off-loading recordings into the box. This reduces the number of possible points of failure by many orders of magnitude.

I’d suggest chalking this up to your education and soldiering on. Good luck.

46

“recording instead directly to a stand-alone hard drive, then off-loading recordings into the box.”

That’s not a solution that is abdication and not very possible with the workflow I had setup with the console, my laptop and cubase.

I am also in contact with Intel since A&H seems to not want to make it their problem.

They made it clear that Intel made a mistake in their xHCI drivers, then why doesn’t Intel(a huge company) want to fix this ?

I blame the manufacturer because they were aware of this possible issue and made no warning in the documentation about it.

47

The manufacturer of course being intel?

The desk is USB2, and it works just fine.
Your USB3 chipset doesn’t support USB2 properly, that’s not A&H’s fault.

It’s not as if cheap laptops aren’t capable of recording a full firehose of data, in the studio then a proper USB2 port shouldn’t be far away anyway.

48

https://www.ebuyer.com/654664-gigabyte-brix-mini-pc-intel-celeron-n2807-barebone-gb-bxbt-2807?a=1&utm_content=654664&utm_campaign=4072|2017-07-28%2008&utm_source=daily_deals_0&utm_medium=email&cid=4072&mid=212585637

£90 for a PC with USB2 ports - add a SODIMM stick and an SSD and you have a PC for <£200 which will record faithfully, and fits in a very small bag.
Set up a VNC server and you can kick off the recording from your tablet, then mix away…

49

Oh yeah that will run a lot of vts…

I understand some of you are well meant when they suggest alternatives but if that’s what I’d wanted, that’s what I would have asked for.

Pardon my naivety for assuming that my top of the line brand new laptop would be more than enough to run cubase(with almost real-time effects) and a state of the art console.

I’ll try again to contact Intel next week since it is obvious that they should be the one fixing it and I never said otherwise.

BUT, if A&H engineer have an idea how to fix this… even if it means starting their drivers from scratch, maybe that’s what they should do. Because as someone else said, this is not a problem that will go away just by managing around it.

50

vts?

Your assumption was that intel could actually code devices according to spec…

Some of us remember:
“We are intel of borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.”

51

Well, apparently everyone with a Intel chipset7 is left behind, Got an answer from Intel. They know, they don’t care, won’t fix. A&H position is that there is nothing wrong with the QU so they aren’t putting much effort into fixing this as much as I understood.

Will try to boycott Intel but those f_____s are everywhere.

Those Ryzen look interesting suddenly. Guess I’ll go back to AMD for a while, like in my youth.

52

Same thing I’m aslo facing, I tried to recording 32 channels through USB B,but all the channels makes some noises, I’m using a Mac. Could anyone help me this ?.

53

Hi all, I’m guessing there’s still no fix for this.

I came across this issue when recording a live show with a QU-24 desk using an Allen & Heath Dsnake.
I’ve attached 2 files to this post, one showing the full on noise issue and the 2nd is a section of a song that has very little of the noise.
2 laptops were used and both had same problem.
Tried different USB ports as well as different DAWs. Reaper (on Windows), Pro Tools and Logic (on Mac). All had same issue.
48KHz, 24-bit, tried 512 256 and 128 samples.
Signal chain was: 19 Mics >> Allen & Heath GL2400 >> Direct Outs >> Dsnake AR2412 >> QU-24 >> USB B >> Laptop.

Prior to the show, the noise was happening a lot but during the show it only happened a few times and stopped after a short time.

Someone suggested it might be a clocking issue. What do you think?

54

What firmware version are you running on the QU24?

Not that it is the issue but what function is the GL2400 doing in this set up.

55
Tried different USB ports as well as different DAWs.

did you try an USB 2.0 port?

56

Thanks for the reply Mike,
I’m not sure of the firmware version. The Qu24 is installed in a venue 1.5 hours away from me, so I can’t immediately check. I’ll find out and make another post.

The GL2400 is running FOH and Foldbacks. The QU24 runs from the Direct Outs of the GL2400 purely for recording.

57
did you try an USB 2.0 port?

Yes. 2.0 and 3.0 ports were tried. but there was no difference. The noise still occurred.

58

I only ever got that distortion noise when I used too many plugins on both PC and Mac [whilst multi-tracking]
Can I ask what is the DAW you were using and was the same sample rate on the PC through all stages from USB ? To keep that the same as the QU ?

59

Thanks for the reply Mike,
I’m not sure of the firmware version. The Qu24 is installed in a venue 1.5 hours away from me, so I can’t immediately check. I’ll find out and make another post.

The GL2400 is running FOH and Foldbacks. The QU24 runs from the Direct Outs of the GL2400 purely for recording.

Let us know the firmware version.

For the sake of checking have you listened to the outputs on the QU24 just to double check that they are clean.
Also for testing make a multitrack recording on the Qu Drive and listen to those files.

Why don’t you use the QU24 for everything, it will do everything you need all with in the same board.
GL2400 are fine boards, I have two of them but the QU does so much more.

60
For the sake of checking have you listened to the outputs on the QU24 just to double check that they are clean. Also for testing make a multitrack recording on the Qu Drive and listen to those files.

I did listen through headphones while recording and there was no problem at all. Also did a multitrack recording on the QuDrive and those files are absolutely clean.

Why don’t you use the QU24 for everything

The venue is run by a couple of old-school analogue guys who would like to solely use the qu24 but don’t have the skills with digital. I will be teaching them on using the qu but I feel I need to sort out this noise issue before saying it will work well.

For the recording, I used the QuDrive as well as a laptop in order to have essentially a redundant system if one were to fail. Glad I did because parts of the laptop recording (via USB) was unusable.