Digital noise when streaming audio via USB-B.

[MegaUnbalanced]

Ok so by purchasing a 700€ dante card I could stream audio between modern computers and SQ5 reliably. I guess only the dante driver for the DAW would then be needed, in addition for the A&H dante card? Cheers.

But how about MIDI then, would the A&H DAW Control Driver be then used to transmit midi messages from Live/DAW to sq5? In order to control the desk mutes etc. Does it work over Dante? How would the devices in this case be connected?

I saw the midi specification here: https://www.allen-heath.com/media/SQ-MIDI-Protocol-Issue1.pdf

I have also previously controlled an earlier A&H desk with midi. But the problem was then that using only midi over usb would wreak havoc occasionally when using USB3 with A&H. So midi too needs to be transmitted over lan in this case. Can it be done with dante?

Thanks Steffen, your response is highly appreciated.

[MegaUnbalanced]

According to this it should be possible to transmit both midi and dante audio over lan for A&H over a single cable: https://community.allen-heath.com/forums/topic/qlab-trigger-through-dante/#post-86978

However am I right to suspect I could just do the following and run audio AND midi both ways between our DAW and SQ5:
-Add a dante card for SQ5
-connect the ordinary SQ5 rj45 network connection AND dante rj45 to an external router
-install the dante driver for DAW and connect it to the router
-sort the ip addresses etc

So no other expensive additional purchases except for the dante card? Sorry I’m quite a noob with dante. Would this combination work reliably (I mean two shows for a day, five days a week, full houses – reliable) for midi also?

If this would be a route around the USB streaming mess then it could be worth considering.

Cheers

[Longy]

Yup, basically after paying a couple of thousand pound to buy a high quality mixer to integrate in to my studio, I ended up having to use an imac which I cannot upgrade, even though I need to, because A&H have done jack shit about the usb issue and basically washed their hands with their user base. Tbh it annoys me royally, it’s a fair whack of money for anyone, only for it not to be compatible with new equipment.
Give it another year or so and I will have no choice but to upgrade the imac and consequently have to buy a new mixer too as it isn’t going to work, I doubt I will bother with another from this company, it’s not worth the risk. They have dragged their tails and left many users without option.
Sad really as I have had a few of their desks and always purchased new….I won’t bother next time, even behringer doesn’t have these issues and that companies past with regards to mixers and QC has been dodgy to say the least.
I would expect any company worth its salt to have offered to correct this issue in any way possible, not relying on its users to buy legacy products just to get it to work how it should do.

[volounteer]

@Longy

no need to buy a new imac and upgrade anything
just keep using that imac with the gear you have

I am still running a win XPPro box just fine
also a win 98SE !!

Why replace them when they work fine ???

buy a new PC to do other things and forget imac or buy an imac to do other things but dont fix anything that is not broke

[MegaUnbalanced]

For some it´s unfortunately not an option to just not upgrade their DAW:s ever because of their mixer choise. I’m sure Longy can answer on his part but in this case there is indeed something broke. Surely 98SE is not the answer for it? And pardon me if that was just trolling, I might not understand as I started with 98SE..

[volounteer]

@MegaUnbalanced

you dont need 98SE. There is XP and even win7 that work well.
The problem is win8.1 and win10 and some newer macs.
I suspect there are some linux distros that would work, but have not tried to identify those yet.

There is no need to upgrade when ye olde stuff still works right , and better than most newer software.

The only thing broke is the person who thinks that they can mix and match anything and it will work together.
Systems101 tells you that is not something to rely on.

Do not buy anything until you know all the pieces will work together.
Systems Integrators make a bundle guiding people in assembling a total SYSTEM that works right.

Others make a bundle fixing problems caused by naifs who just bought the ‘best’ of everything (or their preferences) without verifying the pieces will play nice together. I fixed a govt agency that made that mistake in the name of ‘fairness’ to bidders of comms gear but failed to require that they meet any common standard let along guarantee it would work together. Random matching of low bidders is not the path to success, especially when their stuff does not talk to each other.

The Fundamental Law of Systems says you can NOT optimise the system by optimising the subsystems.
The corollary says that the optimum system will have less than optimum subsystems.

That means that your best audio system may have to use an older PC or a different mixer……..

Now there used to be companies that fixed PCs to ensure they worked right for audio. There may well still be somebody out there that would tweak your computer to run the DAW you think you ‘need’. The FAA went that very expensive route finding that they had to keep making expensive custom changes so the ATC system would keep working without airplanes crashing needlessly.

[MegaUnbalanced]

Well I’m unsure if The Fundamental Law of Systems will be of any help for all the freelance sound designers trying to connect to our company sq5 as it is marketed as having a 32×32 USB audio interface.

Is anyone at A&H following this discussion, do you have reasonable advice or new information on how current computers can be connected to A&H mixer trouble free by using USB? Are you aware of any recent laptop models which will work with sq5 or more specifically the recent usb technologies which will work with a&h desks?

Cheers..

[volounteer]

@megaunbalanced

I agree. Most people do not even know the law. And others refuse to believe it.

If AH does not answer and tell you what computer can be connected then you will have to try them all until you find one.
Be aware that that may never happen with newer ones.
Your best bet would be to start with win 7 and use the software that will run on that box.

If you insist on picking the DAW then you have to use a PC that that DAW will run on and then you are back to square one
hoping that that PC/DAW will connect with the AH device.

The correct method is to ask AH what PC(s) can their box connect to.
Then see what DAWs can be run on that/those PC(s).
Finally pick the PC/DAW that is least worst for your desirements.

Your chances of getting exactly what you want are fat slim and none.

[MegaUnbalanced]

I’m referring to whole workstations, not just software. Can we please keep the subject on how to troubleshoot the specific digital noise issue present with A/H desks. Questions get easily drowned in ramblings. It would be great if someone from A&H could chime in.

[volounteer]

@megaunbalanced

That is what I am talking about.

I gave you the answer. You refuse to believe it.

The noise issue is not the AH desk.
It is SYSTEMS issue that includes your PC, DAW ,drivers, crapware ,buffers, perhaps external things, all in addition to what AH provides which cannot be changed.

Either you change your workstation or else keep whining about the problem cause you dont like the answer.

[tanilas]

Yep, it is pretty painful to try to find some useful information here in between long rants, especially when being already frustrated with the existence of the issue itself.

Despite the problem being a major blocker studio use, I’d expect A&H to provide a good summary of this issue and tentative workarounds, probably pinned in the forum frontpage etc. kinda the similar way they did with USB stick support.

[MegaUnbalanced]

volonteer, have you read and studied this thread?

See Alex’s post:
“– The USB 3.0 ‘Intel’ issue affects Mac and PC, as Apple have been producing Intel based computers for a number of years.
– USB implementation can indeed be seen as a standard, and they’ve even made their implementation open to other manufacturers, which is one of the reasons this has become such a problem as (by their own admission) their USB 3.0 host controller isn’t fully backwards compatible with the USB 2.0 standard.
– Qu and SQ both use USB 2.0 (as labelled on the socket itself), this is to do with hardware, not something that is changed through firmware.”

What I gather from this is that A&H have followed the standard in such a way that there has now been a long going communication problem between intel USB 3.0 host controllers and A&H desks. The notion of “yes we have followed the spec” does not unfortunately help the customers who would want to use the port for reliable communication between computers and the desk, not as an unusable technology demonstration. That is after all what they are made for. Yes it’s unfortunate if Intel has not followed their own spec when engineering backward compatibility for their more recent tech. However desks of other manufacturers seem to work fine with Intel USB 3.0 host controllers, at least according to some users here. What have they done differently and have they not followed the standard while doing so? Is it impossible to manufacture a desk compatible with Intel USB 3.0 host controllers and to follow the USB2 standard at the same time? For this I haven’t seen an answer here.

Now when a manufacturer finds out that the ports in their device don’t communicate with current world out there you would suppose they would either a) fix the problem with firmware b) if the issue is unsolvable by firmware then fix it by upgrading the hardware for following revisions of the desk or c) if all of this is out of their reach then abandon that port. I understand A&H have done work with firmware but have been unable to solve this conflict. Despite of this knowledge the same hardware/firmware solutions have apparently been used for newer desks so the same issues are present in them . As an user I find this hard to accept.

When A&H have researched this problem they sure have gathered information of the systems (workstations) and components involved in them that work or do not work with their desks. I would very much like them to share us this information, as they seem to be continuing to use the same usb technology. And I welcome A&H to correct me if I miss something here.

volounteer, please understand that if using old computers with USB2 has proved to be a viable way for you to bypass this issue when using A&H desks, this might not be a solution for the actual problem or for the rest of the users. I´m happy if you have found a system that works for you. However please don’t encourage the manufacturers to further engineer and release products which have known issues by claiming that all users should just use ten year old workstations to bypass them. If your issues are solved, then great, let the others try to find answers for their issue.

[MegaUnbalanced]

tanilas, yes that’s what I would have hoped to find at least too. A&H have also gathered information from users concerning their workstation stats to try to solve this issue. So it would seem quite reasonable to also share their findings with the user community (=customers or representatives of them).

[Longy]

The reason I am looking at a new iMac is that I find it underpowered for some of the software I use currently. I want the ability to not worry about cpu/ram heavy vsts that I use on occasion and thus also reduce latency issues that arise when the cpu is taxed. My normal course of work is to record midi for the vast majority of synths and drum machines I use, I rarely print anything down until the song is structurally complete. With the introduction of more n more effects or processing there comes increased latency which just throws everything out. This is what I need to avoid as it really does mess with the process.
Hence wanting to get a much more powerful iMac. I would switch to PC but with the only way to aggregate interfaces being asio4all, it makes it unreliable (in my personal experience). Mac makes it much easier to aggregate the QU32, MOTU828 mk3, 2 ADA8200’s and some synth modules that I use audio via usb for. It’s far from a simple setup and there are always pitfalls and avoiding those is often hard enough without having to deal with poor usb implementation on what is, in my eyes, considered to be a high quality mixer.

I can’t afford to go buying an iMac to find it doesn’t work, nor can I afford to buy multiple pc’s to find out if those work.
The reality of the situation and the thing you seem to ignore is that THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. This is an oversight by A&H which has affected many many users as can be see in some of these threads, both here and on other pages.
The passing of the buck is almost embarrassing on A&H’s part and I feel they have fallen short of their responsibilities of providing a fully working product, it’s like buying a tv or car and finding that the tv will only accept certain usb devices or the car only runs on one brand of diesel. Not the greatest of analogies but I am guessing you will see my point, or not lol.
I feel A&H should have recalled the mixers to correct the issue in the board, not brought out more new mixers only to ignore the issue and rely on the users to either stay in the past with regards to their pc/Macs, or to chase ghosts and find things will work at our cost.

[Frank]

So at least as an user, who specially buyed an used Lenovo TP 410 only for having a working system…

I think, USB per se perhaps will not be a future solution for multitrack recording and playback. If sometimes my Lenovo will break down my further solution will be to own a mixer with the possibility of LAN connection for this purposes (multitrackrecording and playback with a modern DAW like Cubase for example), for example with Dante protocol. This would be possible with the SQ series, but unfortunally not with the QU series. The only drop of bitterness is the price of the Dante-card until now. Perhaps future mixer should have this onboard as initial equipment! This would have a lot of advantages, not at least, that the lenght of cable don’t matter!!! Important, if the mixer is placed some where in the band-room, and the laptop near the keyboarder, like me, controlling this from my keyboard position.

We will not get a solution because this seems not to be solvable from A&H because of necessarity to change hardware ore complete new software of this mixers (other mixers like Midas M32R don’t have this problem, as I heard). But you are true… this must be solved in future products of A&H!!! Until this time, perhaps Dante-Card in SQ’s will be the only solution…?!?!

And I am also a little bit disappointed, that A&H does not clear and honest explain, that this will not work with their otherwise perfect mixers and at which time they will be able to present a new way of multitrack transmissiom, for example via LAN…

[Author]

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