Qu-24 electrical noises during streaming

[troyp]

Hi, I’m having a problem with electrical noises being introduced into our recordings when using USB streaming. Our problem seems to be similar to this one and we can’t figure it out.

Our QU-24 board is brand new. We have L/R going into MTX1-2 which then goes out through USB streaming. At random times and for random durations we get this electrical noise. We have tried changing out the USB cable for a higher quality, shorter cable and also have made sure ST3 is muted and we get the same problem. We are streaming to a Windows machine normally (only stereo, not multi-track), but have tried a Mac and the same issue occurs. Qu-Drive recording works flawlessly.

Here’s a link to a sound file demonstrating the problem. You’ll see at around the 37 second mark, it stops. Any help would be appreciated.

Troy

[Andreas]

Which DAW are you using? Are you sure to setup samplingrate (48kHz) and sync (clock slave to Qu) correctly?

[troyp]

Just using Audacity. We’re just a small church and so we’re not doing anything terribly complicated. I thought on Windows the sampling rate was set through the A&H ASIO driver interface and not the DAW.

[troyp]

Sorry, I see the link to the sample didn’t work. https://www.dropbox.com/s/74c0i7dsc9onv8d/electrical-noise-sample.mp3?dl=0

[Andreas]

Are you using an ASIO enabled version of Audacity? Did you choose 48kHz samplingrate? Are there other applications running which may use Audio Streaming via Qu?
I know others around here successfully using Audacity with the Qu.
Maybe you could give Tracks Live a try. Cost nothing and works nicely using ASIO on Windows.

[troyp]

Andreas, we do use another app to live stream the audio, but have had this issue occur even when it’s not running. The sample file was recorded this morning without any other apps running using streaming. I didn’t explicitly set 48k sampling rate in Audacity, so I’ll do that and report back if anything improved.

[troyp]

So I made sure Audacity was set to 48kHz sampling and still the issue exists. I can’t try Tracks Live on the Windows machine at this time because it’s 64-bit only apparently.

[Andreas]

So what’s the machine you’re working with? Proper audio streaming requires a decent amount of performance, since with the Qu24 the system has to stream 32+30 channels even if you only record stereo.
And you didn’t yet answer my question if you’re using an ASIO enabled version of Audacity (needs to sign contract with Steinberg, downloading the support files and recompile on your side). If that’s not the case, you may want to retry with the Reaper evaluation version just to see if it works.

[Anonymous]

Does this occur when using QuDrive as well?

[troyp]

Andreas, thanks I must have missed the fact that you have to compile Audacity yourself to get ASIO support. I’ll probably install Tracks Live or Reaper on my Windows desktop and see if the issue is solved since they include that support. If so, I’ll compile it or consider switching.

Thanks for the thoughts on performance also. I’ve been barking up that tree but with three very different computers (2 of which are pretty new with good specs) that all have the problem I’m thinking it’s something else.

Bob, yes QuDrive works without issues and thus far that’s what I’ve been using to get good recordings.

[Anonymous]

Yes, ASIO on audacity is an oddity. I had to compile that several years back for some adat cards…

[Mikey B]

I’m getting this sound running I3 windows 8 machine with 8 gig ram. On playback on ANY SOFTWARE including windows media player.

This is from my thread a while ago about this

USB B streaming to the comp, it seems to be recording into Sonar 8 just fine but during playback there is a screeching sound, almost like the old dial up connection sound. It’s louder than the recordings and is intermittent… Just comes and goes… Sometimes you can hear it manifesting as just some pops and clicks, other times it’s full on burying the sound in the most annoying screech… At first it seemed to come after a few seconds of playback while recording and then stop, but I’ve been playing with buffers and things (not sure if that has anything to do with it) and now it seems to just come and go … I’ve tried just about every buffer combo there is and nothing seems to change it much… If anything it maybe seems worse with large buffer caches…

I’m pretty sure it’s a playback issue)

Happens with material recorded elsewhere and run through Sonar as well…

Any help would be greatly appreciated…. It’s really really freaking annoying and loud…

[Mikey B]

Happens even when just streaming mp3s from the comp over USB to the QU32 as well.. Or tracks recorded elsewhere, or any configuration

[Andreas]

@Mikey: Are you running the Qu through a Hub? Checked a different USB port, maybe? Are you running any other high bandwidth USB devices concurrently (i.e. USB Disk)? Did you try to update the Intel System drivers (called “Intel INF Update”)? Is there any other application using the Qu as an audio device (Skype, for example)?
If it is a noise like the one in the link above that’s pretty clear a buffer over/underrun issue, caused by different understanding of samplingrates between Host and Device (I’ve implemented audio streaming on several platforms and I’m _very_ familiar with that sound).

[Anonymous]

Just to note that some USB ports on a computer will be on an internal hub with certain others…
So you can easily get different performance in different ports, and it can change if you plug other things in to various ports…

[Author]

Posts