Re: Modern DAW Tweaks for ASIO, EWS88MT Crackles and the E-Mu

Laurence Payne wrote:
Don't worry about the keyboard and mouse settings in Device Manager.
Yaeh, this is minor stuff. As long as the sound card doesn't share IRQs
with any other device, there shouldn't be major problems. Which doesn't
mean there couldn't, of course.

The main tweak needed for a DAW is to set processor priority to
background services.
Is this for certain for multicore machines, too? One would think this
would matter less for two processors, since recording takes very litttle
CPU, and the other core can run the driver, the one which doesn't run
Sound Forge, in this case.

Your soundcard driver is a background service.
I've heard this one recommended for ASIO in particular. And ASIO, while
popular, is not a officially supported driver service, I wonder if it
runs in kernel mode. At any rate, is this equally relevant in other
audio technology such as WDM kernel streaming as used by Sonar (4 LE)?

One hopes that Cool 'n Quiet is clever enough not to throttle back the
CPU while audio is streaming.
It only lowers the CPU frequency when it isn't used much, and even then
it is adjusted some tens of times a second, I think. I turned it off and
it had 0 effect on the crackles.

Do you really need to run two audio systems?
Yes, I'm using a speech synth in addition to the audio stuff, to access
the computer, and so need that one for reading Sound Forge and Sonar
dialogs, for instance. I can turn it off during recording, and do,
though. The reason why a separate card is needed is the sampling rate. I
recored at 44 or 48 kHz 16 bit but the speech synth I'm using is only 22
khz, which is quite common. On some cards, this evilly resamples
everything to 22 kHz, in stead of upsampling 22 to 44 or 48 kHz on the
fly. Still, the screen reader doesn't cause the crackles, I've tried
that, too. I have my monitors handle all the synth and other output, and
have separate, rather crappy but sufficient, speakers for the speech.

Can't you disable the onboard audio in BIOS?
Tried that, too, but it didn't have any effect either. the card claims
to use some internal bus not PCI, so I suppose it doesn't affect the
timing of other PCI devices. The only 2 I have, not counting PCIE, are
this TerraTec card and the HardSID card, which sits most of the time
unused.

Is the Terratec card up to date with latest drivers?
Yes, I've double checked that.

I did get the problem solved but not in the way I expected:
I've also had an E-mu 0404 USb for some time mainly for recording on the
laptop. I pondered for a while and concluded that a working card with
two ins and outs plus SPDIF is better than the crackly TerraTec. So now
the TerraTec is physically removed from the machine and I use the E-Mu
as my primary sound card. It works wonderfully.

One thing I noticed instantly, and this isn't imagination since another
unrelated person confirmed it, is that the sound quality is much better.
I claimed my cheapo Behringer mixer for noise and some lack of highs.
But I definitely get much less noise with the E-Mu, and a crisper sound
all in all. Its quite noticible even when playing a simple triangle wave
patch on the higher octaves.

Now I wonder if the DACs have advanced significantly or if my 5-year-old
TerraTec might have had some physical fault with it that I had failed to
notice. it could be the TerraTec sampling rate, too, but recording at 44
kHz in Forge, which is what I tried, should have resetted that, I guess.
Not when playing synths directly, though, darn I should have chedcked
the rate before these comparisons. I'm pretty certain it was at 44 kHz
in the TerraTec control panel the last time I looked. Now, off to
comparing existing recordings I've made with my mixer, synths and the
TerraTec with those of the E-Mu.

as far as software goes, in FOrge I can easily get the lowest latency of
2 ms, though I've set up mine to 5 as that's quite sufficient, without
any crackles at all. Oddly, with ASIO and WDM drivers in Sonar 4, it
claims that the latency is 10 ms but probably doesn't show it quite
right, since I don't seem to notice any in normal playin of soft synths.
I haven't tried anything very fast yet.

The 2 ms latency cannot be right at the 44 kHz I'm recording, though. I
do know latency is measured in buffers of samples, and so the higher the
sampling rate, the lower the latency. The E-Mu control panel probably
shows it at 96 kHz not 44.1. Another point, isn't USb bound to introduce
a litle latency, too? Not sure how much, since I don't know much about
the internals of USB, but surely most USb devices aren't exactly as real
time as sound cards are. NOt sure if the USB2 latency is any more
significant than PCI. This might be just another silly generalization
without facts, namely that since most USB ddevices aren't as real time
as most PCi devices, it might mean more latency. But USb is much newer
and much faster, too, PCI being quite a legacy system at 66 MHz or
something.

Another thing I've been wondering is how other USb devices affect
matters. Just yesterday, with the TerraTec, after having recorded a bit
in Sound Forge and doing some trimming, the machine threw up a BSOD.
This time it claimed that a driver thought some memory that was paged,
wasn't, or vice versa, and said the driver was mouhid.sys. I guessed
right it is related to human interface devices, its the USB mouse driver
shipped with XP, written by MS, and digitally signed. Odd, very odd in
deed. This is a normal Logitech USB mouse I'm using, with no extra
software. I'm beginning to suspect faulty memory.

But if so, Is there a good way to test, and how do I know which block? I
have 4 GB of which 3.5 are visible, no matter what BIOS tweaks I use or
if Pae is on or not.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
.

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