Random electrical noises during playback (studio use)

Thanks heaps for the work going into sorting this issue!

Hopefully they can do something about it TritonX. It seems a waste of a major feature of the QU mixers to not be able to record using the inbuilt usb interface for it’s intended job. Look forward to hearing more, hopefully positive news.

Was only thinking earlier, if it is true that newer systems have removed the option for disabling xhci, then that buggers up the plan of building a new system to, so the sooner they can sort the issue, the better. I really don’t want to send this board back to the shop I purchased it, it’s still boxed and unused as it stands but I’m not all that fussed by other options that are currently on the market and really don’t want to go back to using the MOTU and Ada’s for input/output.

I haven’t been able to disabled xhci on my new Dell. I have been meaning to look into it more thoroughly but my initial search through bios was unsuccessful. Quite annoying…

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This is for the community using QU16/24/32 with Linux and e.g. Ardour as a DAW software.
The random glitches during streaming (i.e. playback) are caused by hardware issues on the PC side, linked to CPU throttling. The CPU being throttled down during playback causes handshake issues in the USB communication to the QU XX mixer.
If you have an older PC w/o CPU throttling, you will not experience glitches.
If you have an AMD hardware and you manage to disable throttling, you are also set.
If you have an Intel hardware (like I have), you may experience troubles to stop the PC from throttling down the CPUs.
In this case, none of the following solutions mentioned in earlier or related posts will work:

  • Buy a better USB cable (actually a USB cable is either broken or it works)
  • Buy a USB 2.0 PCI card
  • Play with buffer sizes and real time settings

The hard and reliable way is to use the QU16/24/32 for recording only and the audio device built in the PC for playback.

If you launch Ardour, it will determine that jack is already running and thus connect smoothly.
Mind that you may have minor timing differences between the audio devices.

Brgds
Axel