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Pops and Clicks?

Profile picture for user DrummerDan
Submitted by DrummerDan on

I am the new owner of a Focusrite 18i6 and i must say it sounds great! the built in pres are clean, and the 6 external pres i got running into it are as clean as a whistle. BUT. I get intermitant pops and clicks that i just cant seem to find a reason for. Sometimes its just static at the end, but when i was recording my cover of Enter Sandman for my cousin, the floor tom track in the beginning was like popping popcorn instead of a beautiful tuned Pearl VSX floor shell. It was quite unnerving and disapointing i must say.



IF there could be any assistance to my problems then That would help greatly.



Thank you

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Boswell
Boswell

The 18i6 is a nice unit, and I was certainly impressed with the sound of one I heard recently. It's a pity that they designed for a maximum level at the rear panel line inputs of only +10dBuFS, which means that when connecting external pre-amps, you have to throttle back on their gains or use attenuators. I did, however, raise more of an eyebrow when I saw that the 18i6 had a USB interface rather than FireWire, but I suppose that Focusrite has seen that the number of new computers with native FireWire using the TI chipset is close to zero, and they made a marketing decision.



You don't say what type of PC and operating system you are using with your 18i6. My guess is that your pops and clicks are not directly a problem with the Focusrite product, but that you have a USB latency problem in your PC or Mac. Focusrite has a rather trite [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.focusrit…"]Answerbase[/]="http://www.focusrit…"]Answerbase[/] for the 18i6 on its website, which in turn points to pages giving methods for reducing latency on a PC, but there's not much help for Mac users.



If you have done all the usual things to reduce USB latency, try taking the interface to a different computer to see if the problems are the same as on yours.

Mon, 06/20/2011 - 02:34 Permalink