Question

Hi all,

After researching extensively I see there are others who are having the same problem with clicks and pops in audio when using the iTwo. I've posted to the forums as well to see if I can get help there.

I just got it last night and hooked it up, did a fresh install of the latest drivers 2.21.0.5653 and firmware 1.25 with VSL 1.3.5653. Regardless of using it in Ableton 8 or Ableton 9, I get the same results with audio dropouts and insane CPU usage which never happened before when using ASIO4ALL drivers.

I have followed multiple instructions from all sources I could find, tried USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports and made no difference. Increased and decreased the buffer size (Cmon, even at 512 I shouldn't be getting ANY pops or dropouts!) and still will get random drops even when using ONE vst like Omnisphere or Dune 2.

I'm on a i7-3770 3.4GHz with 24GB of 1866 RAM. There's no reason at all I should be having any problems, especially since with only my stock soundcard and ASIO4ALL drivers I could run MANY instances of VST's with absolutely no clicks or jitter and maybe 12% CPU usage on Ableton. With the iTwo it seems that I hit into 70% CPU usage which makes no sense at all. Even worse when I add plugins to the mix. It's pretty much un-useable as it is and I got it in the first place to eliminate having to use ASIO4ALL and be able to decrease my buffer size to 128 or better.

I'd like to try and figure it out before I send it back and go with another interface so I will try anything I can to make this work. Your help and suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Thank you,
RM

Answer 1

The reason your onboard sound card with ASIO4ALL was working differently was that ASIO4ALL is a DirectX shell that wraps itself around the WDM Driver to give you ASIO connectivity. The Direct X driver is managed by Windows, however it will resample audio to match the need of the application and the needs of the OS making it unreliable for quality audio recordings.

Switching over to ASIO supported audio interface means getting a device that does not use Direct X. ASIO is not supported by Microsoft therefore PC optimizations must be done. ASIO will bypass all kernel mixing operations to give you a clear path to 24 bit audio. Setting your buffers to 64 will most certainly impact even the most powerful systems.

The data path from USB to Direct Memory must be clear of obstructions. You may have other devices on your system that are sharing resources with your USB bus that are interfering with the audio stream.

Consider looking at your system to see if you have an DPC latencies that will affect realtime audio operations. A great tool for that is available here: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Read up on how to use that tool and how to dial your system in for better ASIO device performance. Most often the biggest culprits for pops and clicks with ASIO's on PCs are the video driver and the network card driver. Check your motherboard manual to find a USB controller that is not shared with another embedded device. ASUS Motherboards always have this in the PCI section of the manual.

If you're still having issues, you can turn to the user forum to get input from others on how they resolve the issue, and/or you can contact us at support.presonus.com so we can see if we can help you further.