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Strange Crackles / Pops

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 2:17 pm
by fraz
Hi,

Occasionally when playing back a song or even if the DAW is laying idle but turned on with the project window in SFP being open and the sequencer being open as well I get the odd pop which can be heard via the speakers and when it happens the meters go up for a split second.

I figure it's something to do with the audio card / drivers possibly but it would be nice if this could be eliminated. My current settings are 16 bit 44.1 Khz with my Scope Asio driver which gives me a latency of around 7ms.

Any help and advice on the options I have will be appreciated... :)

Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 2:34 pm
by dawman
7 msec's is about how long it takes for a drummers cymbal crash to reach your ear if you are on stage w/ him. Try 11 msec., or 13 msec.

I noticed that I was getting crackles that weren't so bad as i was playing live, but it caused me to check my audio chain. Turns out it was an effect on an AUX buss. Made sense to me, as it had no meters, or I/O schemes as you'll find in high quality effects ( SpaceF ).

I always check everything solo'd now, and add until I'm sure it's free of crackles, and Pops.

I only like cereal in the morning.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 2:13 am
by Counterparts
It might be worth turning off any 'low latency' settings in the sequencer too.

In Cubase, there's a setting in the VST Multitrack page (under 'Expert' settings IIRC) which caused me problems until I un-ticked the 'Lower Latency' checkbox there.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:24 am
by dawman
Wow, I just helped myself a little bit. I had it on a very low setting and was unaware of it. So it now is @ a higher setting ( not 4 msec. ). Seems like I got some more room on my meter now to push yet more FAT stuff into. ( 10 msec. )

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:32 am
by Counterparts
For sure a 3ms ULLI setting in Scope will put quite a bit of extra work onto the system's CPU :-)

I think I've just left mine set to the default (13ms or 18ms, can't remember exactly).

Anything under 20ms should be good enough to work with, it's quite hard for a human to detect latencies lower than that.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:07 am
by garyb
on a resonably poweful computer 2ghz p4 or better, you should be able to use 4ms @44.1k all day long on everything but the most demanding mixes.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:17 am
by YiannisK
Hi
I would like to ask how to get a lower latency with wave sourc destination modules.
I do use asio for my sx and everything runs great, but I woud like to add a standalone synth to my project via wave modules.

Ive tried every type of wave module (24bit etc.) but I can't get lower latency than 90 -100 ms( or somewhere in that range, can't remember exactly, on my internet computer now}
If try to lower latency, I get crackles from HELL.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:04 pm
by dawman
I just tried 13msec. @ 44.1MHz and for the life of me cannot hear or feel any difference in Giga either. I never thought to check any of those settings out, and am glad I read this thread. I'm sure I will drop it down to 3 msec. when I record, but for live this is not noticable. So I'm gonna go stuff my routing window up, and add more poly to see what happens. Maybe I'll get some more DSP juice 'eh.



Peace Through Superior DSP's,...............Ronald Reagan 1980.

Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:51 pm
by dawman
I retract my previous statement. This seems to be of no consequence concerning DSPs'. I'm sure if you go to 48KHz, 96KHz, that would devour DSP's. I shall return to 7 msec. as a comprimise. With all of the tube stuff I've been messing w/ I think my head is crackling.