Qu-16 USB Recording and Streaming Problem

[wjl123]

Hi i am facing a problem with recording and playback on the Qu-16. I am currently using Sonar and all my tracks previously recorded are in 48khz and 24bit. During playback through the Qu-16, there is this lofi distortion that appears from time to time.
I also used the qu-16 for a live event yesterday and recorded the multi tracks and realised that the distortion was also recorded into the tracks…

Here is a audio sample of the issue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B–9W4kyFoZlOHZrR0EwNDN3UlE/view?usp=sharing

Note that the during the live gig the noise does not appear in the FOH. I have also attached an image showing the waveform (zoomed in) of a wireless mic track that was muted with the noise.

So far i have tried increasing buffer size and changing stream mode around to no avail.

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[philt80]

Yo. This is exactly the issue that I have been facing. I’m not sure if it is an A&H sub par ASIO driver or computer related. I would start with the computer. I believe that my issue (still ongoing) was a combination of my Samsung 840 EVO SSD and the AMD chipset on my motherboard. For some reason with that combination, the drive functioned fast, windows was super speedy, everything was great but I was at the end of the rope so I decided to take a look at it. I tried updating the firmware on the EVO drive and it kept crashing. A couple of google threads later I decided to wipe my drive and start fresh with a generic 7200 rpm HDD. Things have improved DRAMATICALLY. I use Samplitude Pro X2 and sometimes it will complain of dropped ASIO buffers but I have yet to encounter the buffer overrun that you and I experienced.

What are the specs of the computer you are recording with ie. specific hardware? What is the length of the USB cable? If you are using the Qdrive then all is lost 🙂

Also.. check out a program called latencymon… it will tell you which drivers are peaking the buffers. but I found that the application actually created latency when running..

[wjl123]

Hey, thanks for sharing your experience! i am using a windows 10 MSI GS60 with intel i7, it has an SSD as well and i am recording and playing back from the SSD. DAW i am using is Sonar x3, i have another audio interface a scarlett 18i8 and it seems worked fine without these problems.

I have tried another similar latency monitoring tool but doesn’t seem to show any spike when the problem occurs. i will tried the latencymon the next time. I have an older laptop in the past which faced serious dropout issues with my Focusrite Saffire pro40 and was fixed by disabling lots of devices in the device manager including wifi, gpu and a bunch of other non essential stuff but in my case with this MSI GS60 it doesnt seem to dropout when the problem occurs and it slowly fixes itself after a period of time

I’ve read about the cable needing to be lesser than 2m but I dont think length of the cable is causing this specific problem as i have used the same cable with another laptop and it worked fine without any issues in fact the multitracks i tried to playback were recorded with that other computer with the qu-16.

so i believe this is an issue with this specific computer, probably some settings or some driver issue but i just cant pinpoint the exact source of the problem.

[John-B]

Are any of you recording to external drives? I didn’t see any mention of that. I always record to external drives when feeding to a computer (Mac) in my case. The Qu Drive works fine for me also, just gotta pay close attention to A & H’s approved drive list.

[wjl123]

Hi John, i am recording and playing back from my internal Harddisk which is a SSD.

[John-B]

Hi Wjl123,

I see, interesting! Is that ok per the DAW’s instructions? I was just remembering from my Protools experience, where it was strongly encouraged to record to an external drive. I haven’t done any recording in quite awhile though, so, perhaps that’s ok now!

[philt80]

I’ve never heard of better results recording to an external drive but I will try this. I have 2 internal drives, one for OS and DAW and the other for project files. I’m not sure about my board and I’m thinking of returning it (not sure if I can even). I just rebuilt my PC with non SSD and it is still happening. I thought that the sky was blue again but it is not. Tech support has not really given me a whole lot to work with. The shipping alone (since there is no AH shop close) will cost me about 120$ CAD to ship one way. Great. And I’m not convinced that the issue will be fixed. The board might only be shipped one way unless they or somebody has any solution other than, change the length of the usb cable and adjust the ASIO settings. If I set my buffer size to anything less than 1024 samples it craps out. It should not be this hard.

[John-B]

Hi Philt80,

Sounds like you’ve got a good internal setup with the 2 drives, are they on the same bus perhaps? I don’t know if it’s comparable, but, I tried to record a clients gig,used an external USB2 drive and looped the Qu’s connection through the drive, then to the Mac. Turned out to be big no-no as it’d continously drop out of record, and that was with just 8 tracks. Got a new Firewire drive, (7200 RPM) ran a test with that (FW800)connected, reconnected the mixer via usb. Did a test record in this way, that firewire and USB are 2 different busses, and that seemed to be the fix. I recorded 18 tracks to Protools on the FW external, for 2 1/2 hours and never dropped out of record. I think total session size was about 30-35 gigs if I remember right. Hope this info helps you somewhat, just trying to help!

John

Computer specs are:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,5
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP55.00AC.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.47f2

[Anonymous]

Separate internal drives should be OK – are the separate drives or just one Drive partitioned?

An SSD should be fine either way – but wear levelling algorithms can really stuff performance in batches. That’s why the recommendation is to format the disk, then just record, record until it is time to reformat…

[JohnnyD]

Quote from A&H website:

Windows 10 – read here – please note that the correct operation of this OS with the Qu Windows driver is not yet verified by our Software Test department. As a result, support for Windows 10 is not currently offered for this product.

[wjl123]

Ah that could be the issue, the previous time i recorded through a daw was on windows 8 on another laptop with no issue. Could be windows 10 problem then. I’ve since bought an external hdd and using Qu-drive to record multi-track, working fine so far! Thanks for the heads up!

[Alrod]

Does A&H have an idea as to when the QU Windows driver will be verified on Windows 10?

[Anonymous]

hello, I have the same problem .. Amd 16gb ddr3 6100 fx 120gb ssd verbatim Seagate 1 tb 7200 gtx 580,con a&h qu 16 and Sonar Platinum. you found some solution?

[wjl123]

hey, i never found a solution for it. I just switched to recording with the Qu-Drive instead.

[Author]

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