crackling

[mr blubbs]

after many hassles trying to configure my sound card with sonar, i've reached on something that almost works. but still have one problem. whenever i try to record at 96kHz, i get a crackling on the signal. its still just about there at sampling rates lower than that, but not nearly as noticable.

the crackling is more noticable when certain frequencies go in (no matter which type of source), this may just be due to masking though.

my sound card (edirol 2496) buffers are at 784, read/write i/o buffers in sonar are 512kb, with 2 buffers in the queue and a latency of about 16.3ms.

it's weird too because i don't get any problems recording through sound forge. any idea what could be causing it?

spec is as below:

CPU - AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton
Mobo - Abit NF7-S (nForce 2)
Mem - 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR 400
HD - 120GB SATA 7200RPM Maxtor Diamond Fireball +9 (system)
HD2 - 36.7GB SATA 10000RPM Western Digital Raptor (audio)
SC - Edirol 2496
Gfx - GForce Ti4800SE w/DVI & TVOUT

thanks in advance all.

[reverbnut]

I don't know if this is going to work but give it a shot, i think your 1/0 buffer size is to big bring it down to 64 as well as your sound card's buffer at 64 and let me know if this works for you, it does for me.

[mr blubbs]

thanks for the advice, i'm still trying as much as possible so any suggestions are welcome!

i set my buffers down to as you suggested. it seems that with slow (high) latency settings, the clipping/popping is a lot less frequent, and more noticably cyclic. where as, at fast (low) latency it's more frequent, and so sounds more like a crackle.

sound forge distorts slightly, but not the same type of sound as sonar. so why would they be reacting differently? i suppose that also suggests its probably more of a software problem, than a hardware one?

putting I/O buffers in there makes the crackling even less frequent than with slow latency settings. it also makes me have to raise the latency to avoid dropouts. is this normal?

one very weird thing too. when i was messing around ealier, not play any music, or recording anything, but with a mic and a optical connection from a cd player (on pause), i got this weird hum. kinda like a low frequency sine wave hum. only for a split second, then a slightly louder and longer one, and now it hasn't come back! could this be an interference thing from power/magnetic fields? i haven't got anything near power connections really. not within a couple of feet (excluding computer PSU).

any ideas?

[wogg]

I've got nothing on your crackling problem but the low frequency hum sounds like an intermittent ground connection somewhere in the mic signal path (causing some 60Hz leakage). If it hasn't come back, don't worry about it. If it does, check your cabling.

[reverbnut]

After you've changed buffer size , did you run wave profiler, do you have any other sound cards if not make sure your sound card is on it's own IRQ,the other thing, have you tweaked your system , if you are using xp go on musicxp.net and tweak it, or blackviper.com both of these sites are pretty reliable but be careful with registry's go one at the time to make sure it does'nt bring another problem, after your tweaks re-boot and run wave profiler again, they are also other tweaks in cakewalks files you can do in audio.ini file with notepad, they are many topics on this if you go threw the different forums, the scott Garrigus forum on digifreq.com is for sonar users and that's one of the best forums with a lot of info for sonar users, let me know if this works out.Cheers.

[This message has been edited by reverbnut (edited 06-19-2003).]

[This message has been edited by reverbnut (edited 06-20-2003).]

[mr blubbs]

it'd be 50Hz over here, being quaint old england and all http://www.audioforums.com/forums/wink.gif

thank for the help, i'll have a look and get back to you. not going to have a chance for a few days now. wanted to record our band this weekend too.

once it's all good, it'll be all good! but the wait is damn annoying....

[bassface]

disable/uninstall ure network card.....worked for me

[mr blubbs]

already disabled it, and the serial and parallel ports.

i haven't looked into the windows services yet. that's next on the list. any suggestions which ones can be disabled?

[raoulduke]

The problem I have heard is more of an intermittent pop (more like a snap, because it is very high-pitched) which occurs randomly whether Sonar isplaying or not. Talking to my card manufacturer (Aardvark), they said they had noticed it at 96K rates and it was something of a gremlin, but that Sonar 2.2 with ASIO drivers seemed to fix it most of the time. The upgrade worked for me.