15 yrs of dig. audio, pops & crackles still driving me nuts

[massenmedium]

Thanks xris, but IMO there are only two kinds of digital cables: good ones and broken ones. I'm pretty sceptical of "hi-fi" products in general, but hi-fi digital cables are certifiable snake oil.

Really? You may be right but with coax S/PDIF for instance I think there is a good case to be made for well shielded cables at least. You can quite clearly hear problems with bad S/PDIF connections. Don't know about audio over USB though.

[mbenigni]

Really? You may be right but with coax S/PDIF for instance I think there is a good case to be made for well shielded cables at least. You can quite clearly hear problems with bad S/PDIF connections. Don't know about audio over USB though.

Fair enough. I'd say an inadequately shielded cable is properly a "bad cable", but it does become a quantitative point, especially because what's "adequate" in the way of shielding will vary depending on environment. I mostly like to make fun of people who think that tone will improve with high-end digital cables, when in fact signal quality is in no way transmitted in a serial digital signal. The 1's and 0's are finding their way intact or they're not.

But when I'm done being all snarky I'll concede that you and xris may have a point, since a digital cable that's not up to the task could theoretically cause dropouts. I don't suspect that's my problem, but I guess I have to acknowledge that it's a potential problem.

[massenmedium]

I have to say it surprised me too when I first started using coax S/PDIF, and this was in a controllable environment. Before sorting out a cabling problem with one device there were audible pops, noise and basically poor audio quality. I guess with something like that there's nothing like CRC checking and it's designed to be robust in a way that doesn't completely privilege accuracy. Same with audio CD versus CD-ROM for instance.

[dancerchris]

mbenigni: I suspect your NVidia video card or it's driver. I have an earlier generation NVidia card and have had all kinds of problems in Live with a system that was state of the art at the time it was built. I suspect that either the hardware or the driver has optimizations that confiscate bandwidth of the bus that the audio card is using.

Try this: Open the "Display Properties" (either right click on the background or display from the control panel). "Settings" tab - "Advanced" button. On the "troubleshoot" tab there is a slider. Play with the settings on here and see if it fixes your problems. If it does it is your video card. The easiest is to just set it down to minimum and test. This will most likely yield some cautionary message about the effects but it can be remedied by changing the slider again. When I run Live I am set at the second tick mark from the bottom.

My $0.02

[mbenigni]

I have a very strong hunch that you're on to something dancerchris. Thanks, will test this weekend.

[xristopher]

[quote="
But when I'm done being all snarky I'll concede that you and xris may have a point, since a digital cable that's not up to the task could theoretically cause dropouts. I don't suspect that's my problem, but I guess I have to acknowledge that it's a potential problem.[/quote]


It wouldn't hurt to try. It's a $15.00 test, and if I am wrong, then you still have a nice cable. Sometimes it is the most simple answer that is the best. Cheers,
xris

[SoniCanvas]

Partly just a gripe, but also an invitation for advice, hunches, comiseration, general musing:

I've been at this for a long, long time. I've been building Windows-based DAWs since the early 90's, and wasting more time tweaking them than I care to think about. Now it's 2010, I've been through plenty of professional and "pro-sumer" sound interfaces and still... I don't think I've ever had a rig that consistently performs without pops and crackles.

I'm presently running a very fast quad core CPU, Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate edition, and a Mackie interface with drivers that (alledgedly) support this O.S. The machine ought to be completely overpowered for the sort of recording I'm doing, and I've experimented pretty heavily with latency, buffer sizes etc in an effort to cut it some slack. Still, every few minutes, pops, crackles, and hickups. Nothing let's the air out of your sails faster than this, nothing could be more "non-musical".

I have this very vague sense that some of these pops coincide with screen updates and/or mouse movement. "Back in the day" I would have attributed this to an IRQ conflict of some kind, but configuration of these details has been taken out of the users hands in modern operating systems. All I can do is look at the driver's properties, which assure me there are no conflicts...

Am I alone in this? Is anyone else having similar drama? Has anyone overcome similar drama, and if so, how? Are there a very select few sound cards that are known to be stable in Win7? Are certain graphics cards notorious for interfering with them? And if so, are there ways to tame them?

Running out od ideas, patience... music.

I've been using the PC for 15-20 years - since the original version of Cakewalk up to the current Sonar 8 - and have never had click and pop issues unless I am REALLY stressing out the CPU with tons of tracks, plug-ins and real time processing.
The key for me is I have never used a sound card other than a PCI card. No USB or Firewire - Just PCI. Regardless of claims and current technological advances, the PCI is just faster. Plus I turn off every program that is not essential to the computer running. If you were to to check your MSCONFIG and look at the start-up programs, you might be surprised to see how many things are running in the background when the computer is running. I turn most everything off and I never have issues. Like a previous post said anything that requires a few milliseconds of CPU time to due some business can cause a click or pop in the audio interface. I had to turn off my video accelorator because it was causing major hiccups when recording and playing back. That happened when I installed Sonar 8. Never happened BEFORE Sonar 8, but it suddenly became an issue. ANY little thing can cause an issue and you have to stay on top of it.

[mbenigni]

Good stuff, thanks!

[mbenigni]

I did some experimenting. Seems the only way I can get good, consistent behavior out of this specific build is by disconnecting from our network. Should have been the first thing I tried, I know, and I have made a point of running this way in the past. But these days I use my audio PC for practicing and learning quite a lot, where I'm referencing online charts, videos, etc.

Is everyone else running without a network connection on their recording PCs? Or is this perhaps a Windows 7 compatibility problem with this card's drivers? Any optimizations that might allow the connection to remain up without causing these intermittent problems? I'm guessing it's polling on a timer or something.

[tom.luft]

I also used to have problems with pops and clicks - until I tried a DPC-Latency Checker Tool and figured major latency issues. I tracked down the problem with Microsoft's DPC latency auditing tool. It showed very high latencies caused by the acpi driver (acpi.sys) which forced me to switch from an ACPI-multiprocessor driver to a MPS-multiprocessor one. This could be a common issue with laptops and poorly programmed acpi implementation. I also have to switch off my WLAN-card, because it is causing latencies up to 2500us.
I never had issues, however, until now. I get pops and clicks even without stressing the CPU (starts at 30%). I use to work with live at 44.1khz, 24bit and 8ms latency (max. bearable), so no stressing here.

My system is a Compal Hel 81 laptop with an Intel dual core CPU @ 2 GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB 5400rpm IDE internal drive, 2 external drives (1 of them includes my Komplete 6 library - 1TB @ 7200rpm), Win XP without effects, any services and devices not needed disabled. My soundcard is an EMU 0404 USB one, with its USB cable plugged directly into the laptop (so no hubs in between). I use a Miditech Midicontrol 2 keyboard, a Oxygen 8v2 controller and the Launchpad (all connected to one hub).

This crackling and popping makes me crazy - that's no way of making music, it is robbing all the fun and creativity. Any suggestions (other than buying a highly overpriced apple system)?

[mbenigni]

Tom, I think the first thing I'd consider are the external drives, and the relatively slow 5400RPM drive. But realistically, unless you're stressing the system with lots of simultaneous audio tracks, a modern 5400RPM drive shouldn't present a problem.

When you say "I never had issues, however, until now...", the question that springs to mind is "until when?" i.e. What changed between the point where you were satisfied, and the point when you started having trouble? A new version of Live, of Windows, any new hardware?

Personally, I'm still going insane with this. Since I last posted I have:

-Installed the latency checker tool (which has only proved that none of the following help).
-Updated video card drivers.
-Disabled all Windows 7 "bling" i.e. disable all Aero effects, adjust all for "best performance".
-Disabled the hard drive indexing service (REALLY thought this would help, it didn't.)
-Installed antivirus software, performed a full scan for threats. None.
-Turned anti-virus back off.
-Disconnected from WiFi network.
-Disabled network card completely.

NOTHING helps. I'm at wits end. As I said, I REALLY thought I'd hit pay dirt when I read about the disk indexing service, because I do notice my HDD light going absolutely apeshit even when I haven't touched the computer for several minutes.

Could it be that I've overestimated Windows 7? Because now that it's burned in for a while, I realize I'm not having a much better time than I did with Vista. It's prettier, but it still performs like crap. Any new ideas?

And again, THANKS for the constructive replies!

[tom.luft]

I didn't change anything in my setup (nothing I could remember, nothing serious then), from one day to another my laptop started crackling when I was watching movies or even when I was listening to music (with buffers set to at least 500(!)ms). I don't think it is a HDD issue, because I get those pops and clicks even without any audio tracks (only midi ones with vsts / and or ableton instruments).

[mbenigni]

Hmm, "nothing serious". But it must have been something. Maybe something you weren't even aware of, like a new driver that came down as part of a Windows update... something. I know with PCs it can seem like things happen for no reason, and they may as well for all the control you have over it, but there's still got to be cause and effect. If you had a full back up of your system from back when you were happy, theoretically you should be able to restore your boot drive and find everything working well again. Next time you're happy, use something like DriveXML to take a "snapshot" of your configuration. I should take my own advice LOL.

Just realized I still have to try dancerchris' advice re: the video acceleration slider. I thought this was very likely the solution (until I noticed my HDD doing the watusi) but I couldn't find it in Win7 (used to be more obvious in XP.) Just noticed he posted pretty detailed instructions, though, so back to the drawing board for me.

It's really my very last hope, though. Fingers crossed.

[mbenigni]

Just realized I still have to try dancerchris' advice re: the video acceleration slider. I thought this was very likely the solution (until I noticed my HDD doing the watusi) but I couldn't find it in Win7 (used to be more obvious in XP.) Just noticed he posted pretty detailed instructions, though, so back to the drawing board for me.

It's really my very last hope, though. Fingers crossed.

Bummer. On my system the button that opens up the screen w/ the slider is grayed/ disabled. (And yes, I have full admin priveleges.) This seems to be specific to the card and/or drivers. Any other ideas besides replacing the video card (again)?

This build remains useless. Grr...

[casiblake]

mbenigi... can you post what motherboard you're using please?

Have you established that clicks and pops disappear, if not entirely, but seem better when you're not connected to a network? Or did this really not help?

Have you got any PCI or PCI-Express audio interfaces you can try, instead of the firewire card? If not, do you have any other firewire cards you can try? TI are usually solid, but in my experience even with a TI chipset, firewire audio just isn't particularly reliable.

I've never once had to use the video acceleration slider to cure DAW problems, only to get a couple of old games and apps working many years ago. You shouldn't ever have to touch this, because all it will do is push more tasks onto the CPU rather than the GPU.

I've used Nvidia cards in the past with no issues, however that was a few years ago and they were Geforce 5500s! My main workstation uses a Radeon 4650 with the standard Catalyst drivers and has no issues.

Perhaps I can offer some tips, but for now I'd like to know what motherboard you're using?