Questions & Answers

Audio degrades

0 votes
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asked Dec 19, 2019 in Studio Series USB Interfaces by robertoformia (180 points)
Dear Sirs, sorry for troubling you. I bought the Studio 68c to use in my home studio, after the previous sound card.

It happens that in a very random period of time, usually not before an hour, the audio (both from Logic Pro, and through any music player) degrades until it becomes inaudible. I state preliminary that the iMac is being used only for music production.

In detail:

I open Logic Pro, load any music file (the files reside on the main SSD of the iMac) – just a few tracks (normally MIDI and audio) – and the CPU varies from low percentages. Note that the various settings are the same as when I had the previous sound card.

The buffer is normally set to 512 samples. Same problem with different frequencies.

The problem seems to emerge randomly; sometimes within about 30 minutes when listening to songs with player; when working on Logic, more or less an hour. It also happens when changing music files, or listening to any music on a player. However, it happens that, opening any file, the audio is intact again. I tried to connect the card to a Mac Pro (early 2009 - El Capitan): no problem with the audio when listening with the player. I don't have Logic installed on the Mac Pro.

The audio chain is configured as follows: iMac to which two external USB HDs (a USB2 for general files - USB3 for the Samples) are connected.

Configuration:

iMac (21.5, end 2009, Intel Core 2 Duo - 3.06 GHz - Ram: 16 GB -1.07 GHz) (Logic Pro 10.4.3, Persons studio 68c)

SAMSUNG SSD 500 GB

Thank you for the kind attention. Best regards, Roberto Formia

3 Answers

0 votes
answered Jan 19, 2020 by tothrec (31,860 points)
I was just about to create a post about this same issue.  Thought it was due to an upgrade to my audio interface (Lynx) drivers, but rolling back to previous version did not resolve the issue.

In my case the static sound starts happening within a minute of playback and steadily increases over the next 30 seconds or so.

Going into Studio One buffer settings and changing them up or down temporarily resolves the issue.

I don't think it's a performance issue since setting them to just 128 sounds fine just as long as when I set them to 2048.

Steven
0 votes
answered Jan 26, 2020 by robertoformia (180 points)
I think it's a sync (clock) problem; but due to what? Some time ago I solved (or at least I believed) changing the USB port of the computer, as one of the ports seemed to me somehow damaged. Well, I no longer had any audio degradation problems. This until yesterday! After listening to music in the morning with the player (iTunes), in the afternoon I opened Logic Pro to make music. In a short time, the audio degradation problem occurs again! At this point I give up, I don't understand this fact. I have not changed any configuration, nothing at all.
0 votes
answered Jan 26, 2020 by tothrec (31,860 points)
My audio interface is via PCIe cards, so it's not a USB issue.
Further, I pulled up a full mix in Bandlab Cakewalk and it played back fine with low buffers, so I don't think it's a system issue.

Steven
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