USB-B Issues – xHCI host controller

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  • #84235
    Profile photo of andyozandyoz
    Participant

    Hi,

    Ever since I have my SQ6 I have never been able to get USB-B to pass audio.
    I spent all day trying to get it to pass simple stereo audio from my laptop but no audio ever registers on he default Ch 47/48 meters (I have done the mono to stereo setting trick).

    I am fairly new to all this and assumed it was me – but I have just found this wee note in this link.

    “Not all USB 3.0 ports are fully backwards compatible with USB 2.0 – USB 3.0 ports using xHCI host controller drivers should be avoided and many are known not to support the isochronous transfer method used for streaming audio.”

    https://support.allen-heath.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/1183/338/understanding-sq-usb-recording-and-playback

    My Dell XPS15 has two USB3.0ports. I went digging around on Device Manager and low and behold it would appear my USB 3.0 do use xHCI host controller drivers (see attached screen grab).

    I have an external port replicator that has some USB 2.0 ports but they don’t work with the SQ either.

    So my questions is – am I bolloxed then and is this expensive Dell laptop useless with the SQ for a DAW or even listening to simple stereo audio?

    At least I won’t spent another day of my life trying to get the SQ to talk to my laptop as it was never going to work.
    Why is this stuff so hard…

    Andy

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    #84240
    Profile photo of hskhsk
    Participant

    Hey Andy,

    I think you pretty well summed it up, yes.

    I went through the same thing with my XPS 13. It basically doesn’t work for audio purposes without tons of clicks and pops.

    The usb ports on the left side and right side are actually different in terms of compatibility and the left side are thunderbolt while the right is not, so I got the SQ to work through the usb port on the right side of my xps 13, but the audio was completely unusable due to consistent popping and crackling sounds.

    It works fine with a macbook pro.

    I also have used a waves card in the sq to output and record audio to the same right side usb port on the same xps 13 and it worked perfectly. This was via a cat6 cable from the waves sq card plugged in to an ethernet to usb-c adapter plugged in to the usb-c port on the laptop (right side only, doesn’t work with ports on left that are thunderbolt usb-c) and using waves soundgrid drivers etc. Waves informed me technically this is not a supported/approved configuration into the xps, so they won’t guarantee it, however in practice it seems to work perfectly for me.

    So yeah, in conclusion you don’t want to use the usb-b into a dell xps.

    #84243
    Profile photo of andyozandyoz
    Participant

    Basically…

    I give up then.

    I have literally spent a week of my time trying to get this to work.

    I assumed I was the issue here as fairly new to this.

    A note on this needs to be included in the manual as that’s the go to spot when setting up (not Knowledge bases)

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