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weevill 9 March 2014

Hello folks. New here...sorry I'm late.

I am wondering if anyone has a view as to why my new PC is struggling to cope with even the simplest of Audio tasks. When recording, or even when simply rehearsing a part, the audio stutters frequently and to counter this, I'm having to adjust buffers to the point where latency is then becoming a serious problem instead. It isn't just a playback thing - it records like it too.
I put the PC together myself (I am no expert but I have 'built' at least a dozen now without any fuss) and I use it solely for recording. The unit functions perfectly well otherwise - boots everything double quick and is stable.
I'm running Cubase 5 only on this now, often with Amplitube3 or Guitar Rig4 plugged in as well.
Even simply playing guitar through the system will sometimes result in the breaking up of the signal

The basics for the PC are:
Asus P8H77-V H77 Socket 1155 ATX Motherboard
Intel Core i3 3240 3.40GHz Socket 1155
G-Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory (9-9-9-24) 1.5V
For the media: 1 x Seagate 1TB Barracuda 3.5" SATA-III Hard Drive - 7200RPM 64MB Cache
For the progs: 1 x Western Digital WD1600AAJS 160GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 8MB Cache

Soundcard/Audio I/O: M audio 410 firewire.

Is there anything that looks incompatible and/or is there something else, some settings, that I should be looking at?

Many thanks.

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Comments

TheJackAttack Sun, 03/09/2014 - 21:55

The 410 is a finicky box. It is not truly 64 bit friendly as when it was designed WinXP was king of the hill. You do not mention what your firewire card manufacture is. You need something with a Texas Instruments chipset. Then chances are you will need to go into the Device Manager and manually change the driver to the generic Win7 driver rather than whatever was installed. If your firewire chip is from Ricoh then you may or may not get the stuttering to cease altogether. Finally, you need to run the buffer up on the 410 probably in the 1024 range through the FW applet.

weevill Tue, 03/11/2014 - 04:15

Thank you!
I had not considered the firewire chipset as being that critical - I re-used one from a previous build so it's a couple of years old. As the FW card is the least costly element here, I think I'll just replace that with Texas Ins one asap.
I knew that the 410 was WinXP born but thought that the updated drivers were working ok - however, taking a closer look at them as well, they seem to have been written for Vista and not Win7. Might that be a factor too?
Thanks again for the help.

weevill Thu, 03/20/2014 - 03:50

Thanks for the advice John.
Finally received and installed TI chipset FW card (previous one was VIA). Unfortunately, there's no noticeable difference though.
Re Drivers: I remember once finding my way into a set of parameters that gave me some driver options other than those in the hardware management tab but can't remember now how I got there! It may even have been through the Steinberg or M Audio software, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment.
I've tried increasing the buffer size but it just becomes so lagged that it's useless. Default is described as 256 but mine is currently set at 1024 with Cubase working at 44.1. This setting is just workable (if you enjoy 'slapback' echo) but still produces errors not only in recording, but also when simply rehearsing parts using a plugin like Amplitube3.
Any other ideas/advice gratefully received!

pcrecord Thu, 03/20/2014 - 09:32

You may want to download latency monitor : http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
I once found out my video driver was causing me issues.
Of course I may state the obvious, antivirus or other things in memory, fragmented or degraded drive, chipset, HDD controller, video, sound drivers...
Also search for windows 7 audio optimisation, there is some good sites...

I wish you the best my friend !

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