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Hi guys, a very strange thing happened to me last weekend and I hope someone can help !

I was recording an amateur rock-opera. 10 Tracks, passive split before the console. The first half of the first set went fine and then all of a sudden I got this strange noise on 2 tracks (lead vox and guitar). 1 Was the first input on Fireproject 1 and the other was input 7 on Fireproject 1.

The second day there were 5 inputs distorting; input 1 + 2 + 6 + 7 + 8, all on FP 1. All the inputs on FP 2 were fine all the time(bass, kick, snare and 2 overheads).

I was on a Lenovo T410, I7, W7 64-bit. SIIG external 2-Port Expresscard firewire interface. SSD with more than enough free space. Multicore enabeled, 48Khz, 24-bits. Buffersize 2048 locked with . Process precision Single (32Bit).

I have added a little piece of the Lead vox as an MP3.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me out here as I have no idea what happened :cry:

Thanks !

Jan

Herrie - Vox Rox.mp3
(1.07 MiB) Downloaded 611 times


Ok, I Lied :oops: sorry ! I listened back the raw tracks and during the second half of the first night on inputs 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8 around 20 mins there is a 2-3 sec gap in the recording. They come back in again, all with the strange distortion.
After the show averything was switched off of course and the second night I had that same distortion on the same inputs but from the beginning to the end.

FP 1 is actually second in line Firewire-wise. The cable from the Expresscard goes to FP 2 and FP2 is daisychained to FP 1 if that helps.

Again, sorry for the misinformation !
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by matthewgorman on Thu Dec 17, 2015 2:21 pm
First thought is the SIIG card you are using. Do you know what chipset it uses?

You can get this type of sound from firewire connection, and/or the cpu struggling. You buffer size tells me that it may not be the cpu, but maybe too early to totally rule that out. It certainly sounds like it, so are you sure about the settings you posted?

Maybe google for latencymon (freeware). Install that, hook up your system in the same way as a recording session without mics, and let latencymon run for a while. Maybe 20 minutes or more, and see what it tells you.

Matt

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 Win 10 64bit, 8GB RAM, Intel Xeon
Lenovo Thinkpad E520, Windows 7 64bit, 8 GB RAM, Intel i5 Processor

S1Pro V5
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by Jan Meerkerk on Thu Dec 17, 2015 2:31 pm
Thanks Matthew !

I'm positive on the buffersettings. CPU has never been above 10% that I saw.

Going to DL latencymon now and let you know what happens.

Thanks again...
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by matthewgorman on Thu Dec 17, 2015 5:14 pm
Good luck. Track down the chipset in that siig card, as it may be the culprit. Texas Instruments chips have been the proven best over the years. There are some cards even on the approved list that can have periodic failures. I have always used startech cards, and would have to say i have never had a problem.

Matt

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 Win 10 64bit, 8GB RAM, Intel Xeon
Lenovo Thinkpad E520, Windows 7 64bit, 8 GB RAM, Intel i5 Processor

S1Pro V5
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by Jan Meerkerk on Fri Dec 18, 2015 4:04 am
Ah, forgot to answer that one; the SIIG card has a TI chipset, that's why I choose that one.

Anyway, I ran Latencymon as you suggested and the outcome was disturbing to say the least. Lots of red indicators. Latencymon suggests the problem is in CPU throttling.

For fun, I also ran the program on my desktop which I bought specifically for audio-editing and the same story there. Major bummer as I expected that machine to be configured for max performance when I bought it.

Funny fact: I still have a very old Dell D800 laptop running XP and testing that actually disclosed a much more stable performance while recording (which is what I still use it for sometimes).

Thanks a bunch for setting me on the right track (so it seems anyway). Gonna work on that...

Jan
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by matthewgorman on Fri Dec 18, 2015 7:38 am
Well now you know. I'm thinking you need to spend some time in the bios, but its not a major overhaul. There are some good tips in the support knowledgebase on optimizing win 7 for audio that I am thinking will get you squared away.

Matt

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 Win 10 64bit, 8GB RAM, Intel Xeon
Lenovo Thinkpad E520, Windows 7 64bit, 8 GB RAM, Intel i5 Processor

S1Pro V5
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by Jan Meerkerk on Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:18 am
Thought I'd let you know how I got this in check. Maybe for future reference if someone else is encountering similar problems.

* I was getting weird distortion in the recorded tracks of the "second in line" Fireproject. Recordings from the first one in line were fine.
* The Latencymon program revealed I had huge CPU latency spikes every 30 seconds or so. Aparently that messed up the laptops ability to maintain a strong firewire-signal
* First I went into the BIOS to disable everything that potentially throttles down the CPU.
* Then I used a little program that controls core-parking and made sure all cores are running constantly.
* Of course all my energy-saving settings were already at max performance.

All of the above helped but there were still spikes although less serious.

* Next step was to disable the wireless wifi.

Even better but still not perfect.

* Now I disabled the wireless adaptor alltogether and that did the trick; no more spikes.
The strange thing although is that now sometimes as I fire up Studio One it says it's not activated on this laptop although it most certainly is. Enabling the wireless and then starting SO solves this. Still: strange ?

* As an inbetween solution I also tried the WLAN optimizer program which can prevent the wireless from scanning for newly found networks and parks it at your routers setting (a, b or g) so it doesn't keep scanning the unused settings.
This largely solves the spikes problem but isn't as thorough is disabling the adaptor alltogether.


I also did the above tricks to my PC which I use for editing and which also had the occasional click/tick/pop going on and it gave the exact same result.
Both are W7, 64-bit, I7, 256G SSD machines. PC has 32G Ram and is a 4-core 3600 mhz, laptop has 8G Ram and a dual-core 2600mhz.


Hope this will help someone one day :D

Again, huge thanks to Matthew Gorman.

Jan
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by matthewgorman on Tue Dec 22, 2015 10:28 am
The strange thing although is that now sometimes as I fire up Studio One it says it's not activated on this laptop although it most certainly is. Enabling the wireless and then starting SO solves this. Still: strange ?


Go to your software in my.presonus account. Where it shows manage activation, hit that button. There is then an option for offline activation, and download the license file. Drag that to the S1 start page when offline, and the activation message should go away.

Matt

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 Win 10 64bit, 8GB RAM, Intel Xeon
Lenovo Thinkpad E520, Windows 7 64bit, 8 GB RAM, Intel i5 Processor

S1Pro V5
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by Jan Meerkerk on Sat Feb 06, 2016 8:56 am
Totally forgot to thank you for that last tip Matthew; I did what you suggested and not one problem after that :thumbup:

Jan

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