Problem Recording using QU 16 USB B with cubase 5

Forums Forums Qu Forums Qu troubleshooting Problem Recording using QU 16 USB B with cubase 5

Viewing 15 posts - 31 through 45 (of 63 total)
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  • #54408
    Profile photo of AndreasAndreas
    Moderator

    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.

    #54410
    Profile photo of Anonymous
    Inactive

    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!

    #54417
    Profile photo of airickessairickess
    Participant

    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.

    #54418
    Profile photo of AndreasAndreas
    Moderator

    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.

    #54814
    Profile photo of VKVK
    Participant

    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.

    #54816
    Profile photo of AndreasAndreas
    Moderator

    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.

    #54817
    Profile photo of Anonymous
    Inactive

    The QU as a soundcard works well – there might be an issue with your unit – but it’d be hard to demonstrate without taking it and your PC to a dealer.

    #54843
    Profile photo of VKVK
    Participant

    @ [XAP]Bob

    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.

    #54867
    Profile photo of Anonymous
    Inactive

    A fair way north….

    I’d suggest that a dealer is going to be in a better place than me to help.

    I don’t know who is around up there though 🙁

    #54890
    Profile photo of ljefeljefe
    Participant

    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.

    #54897
    Profile photo of Anonymous
    Inactive

    My guesses:

    Sensitive USB components (either in the QU, the PC or both) combined with a weak USB cable?
    Software – something that takes a mere few ms will be enough to kill the USB connections, and there are so many things nowadays that assume you have infinite CPU I/O and memory… If I was relying on it then I’d run a standalone PC…

    Have you tried with a SanDisk Extreme in the QuDrive port?

    #54899
    Profile photo of AndreasAndreas
    Moderator

    Technical note: USB Audio frames are scheduled each 125µSec (1/8 mSec). A single missed frame will at least generate a click. A single driver in your system perfoming some sort of busy wait or defers execution of USB handling in combination with non-buffering hardware will break audio streams easily.

    #54907
    Profile photo of Nicola A&HNicola A&H
    Keymaster

    @VK
    Have you tried the latency checker utilities referred to in our KB article? It would be interesting to see your results.

    #54925
    Profile photo of AndreasAndreas
    Moderator

    Thank you for that link, Nicola. I’ve dived into that a little further and remembered the Microsoft tool RATT and found this informative thread in the cocos (Reaper) forum. It basically describes how to track down DPC issues using RATT but even more interesting is, that onboard audio drivers more than once seem to be the culprit for these issues.

    #55054
    Profile photo of philt80philt80
    Participant

    Yeah… so I thought my issue was fixed. As I had changed the video card to and AMD version it appeared to go away for a while but now its back like crazy. I too have to change my sampling rate again and then eventually have to reboot my system. There is enough users with issues now. Where is tech support with a solution?

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