Audio crackles with XITE-1

[Tau]

Hello friends, I’m in need of help here. After a few months off-scope, I decided to give it a go for a live performance I’m doing in a couple of weeks. Thing is, I got this weird problem with occasional crackles in the audio, kind of what you get when audio clock gets out of sync.

My setup is a Lenovo W520 laptop with XITE-1, running Win7 64 bit and Ableton Live. All audio I/O is run through an A16U connected via Z-link, slaved to the XITE-1.

I am running a few MIDI controllers via USB, and that’s it. I remember I was able to use it @4ms without a glitch, but now, no matter how high the ULLI, these random crackles are always there. Not only on playback, they get recorded too, which is really bad.

I was reading through the forum for some similar problems. I don’t have Wave modules in my Scope project, PC has all radios off, anti virus is off too. Power settings to max performance, C states disabled (and clock speed is constant, as I’ve monitored it).

LatencyMon does state that the system is not suitable for realtime audio work, and it points out a usb 1.1 driver, sometimes the power manager… I have removed all lenovo software, and updated all the drivers. But even if I unplug the MIDI controllers, I get the same problem and the same messages.

Don’t know what to try next, any ideias?


Thanks

And by the way, I don’t know if it’s me or just old habits, but, using scope again, after a while, made me realize how good this thing sounds… Sure, native is way more portable, but I really missed the sound of Scope. Now if I could do away with the crackles…

[garyb]

the obvious question is did you disable Turbo, Hyperthreading and EIST(Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology) in the bios?

[JoPo]

I imagine you already checked all clock parameters and all are fine..?

Did you change some hardware in your pc ? When I bought a newer pc, one year ago, I wanted to use the on board video... I had crackles like bad clock setting untill I bought a basic video card.
Otherwise, I don't see why you would have those bad noise if you didn't change nothing in your setup... Maybe a fresh install ?

Edit : But I must say that my Xite is wired to another pc with my 3 pci cards thru adat and if I remember well, crackles were not present when disconnecting the pci's..

So.... In fact, I don't know at all what is your issue....

[pastor]

Do you get the same symptoms using the internal soundcard, and did u try disabling it in bios?

[Tau]

Yes, this is has been a tough one to crack, but thanks for your input.

Hardware-wise it's been unchanged for a long time. And as far as power settings, everything was disabled.

I had one of the USB root-hub drivers still with the option to be turned off by the OS, so I unchecked that, and the USB driver no longer appears in LatencyMon, but still crackles.

I then updated the drivers for the network adapter and GPU, and disabled the GPU High definition audio drivers. Better, but still crackles.

Finally, after all that, I disabled the ACPI control for the battery and also disabled Nvidia Powermizer (which had to be done via regedit).

After these last 2 steps, although LatencyMon still shows some spikes, I haven't been getting any crackles, at least for the past 10 minutes.

Hope this holds!

[jksuperstar]

I have the same laptop. It tries to aggressively save power, at the cost of consistent performance.

First, find an Audio Power profile. I found one on the web, but can't remember where. It is a power profile, that gives full CPU speed (instead of the never 100% Lenovo profiles). You can get CPU-Z to check your settings and that the CPU never slows down below the 2.x GHz (mine would typically back off all the way to 800MHz) and cause drop outs.

Also, turn off wifi if not done already. The hardware radio switch does well to enforce this.

[Tau]

I don't think it was ever this aggressive when I bought it, must have been some update that changed things.

Anyway, the cracles are fewer, but still present. I noticed I don't even have to have Scope turned on to get LatencyMon alerts. It bothers me a little that when I use a USB audio soundcard (iConnectivity Audio4+) I don't get crackles, although I have to set ASIO latency way higher than in Scope.

Right now, I have done all of the above and I also disabled the LAN card (which I actually will need). Radios are off, as are most peripherals in the BIOS: fingerprint reader, card reader, firewire, camera and microphone... will try also to disable the onboard audio card.

I will try to find an Audio Power profile online... first time I hear of this Although the CPU monitor from intel shows that the CPU is always at full speed (maybe with a 1% fluctuation)

According to LatencyMon, the worst problems now come from ACPI.sys (though less than before I disabled battery control) and Intel Rapid Storage (which I have uninstalled many times, although it always shows up here...). Pagefile is always through the roof, I always read that it shouldn't affect performance that much, and I have also tried without the pagefile, always getting the same readings.

[Tau]

OK, installed Process Lasso and everything seems to be running smoothly

[ronnie]

It saves me a lot of headaches.

I set I/O Priority to "High" and Priority Class to "Above Normal" and "Exclude from ProBalance" for scope.exe. I suppose I could also limit the CPU cores as Scope shouldn't care. But with the settings in Process Lasso so far, Scope is solid. Setting my DAW (in this case, Cantabile 3.0) to Priority Class "Above Normal" and excluding it from ProBalance is all it needs to really smooth out Diva. Power setting is set to the Process Lasso "BitSum Highest Performance". Very sweet and that nice warm and fuzzy feeling of a solid rock. So far so good.

Also see this post:

http://forums.scopeusers.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34369