• From: Deutschland
  • Registered: 2017-09-19
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Babyface sporadic clicks (without ASIO as well)

Hi there!

My name is Manuel, I'm from germany and I bought the Babyface in december 2014. The problem now is the following:

I had sporadic clicks and pops in the output and even in the recording (barely audible, but still existent). So I decided to make a very little upgrade, bought a SSD and went from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (all my exact specs are at the bottom of this post). I hoped that a new clean install of the system would help and maybe it was just about the drivers. Unfortunately I now recognized that e.g. while listening to music with the Windows Media Player there are some sporadic barely audible clicks sometimes. Also while watching videos on YouTube. This surely makes me crazy, while I think that something might be damaged.

I already contacted the RME Support, who told me that I should check the hardware on another system. I did on a desktop PC with Windows 7 and a Laptop with Windows 10. With a special project I at least could reproduce underruns with 256 buffer size ... while I suspect that in this special case it might be a software issue and not hardware related. To test if there are clicks while "only using the system without music production" I had to test the Babyface a longer time ... I had no time for this unfortunately.

Still I wanted to contact the reseller and RME. The reseller had no idea as well and told me about this forum.

Another thing I came up with: I installed LatencyMon and saw that the USBPORT.sys seems quite high ... while I am not sure what "high" exactly would be. It told me maximum values from 70 microseconds for the USBPORT.sys driver. The next thought which came to my mind is that my motherboard might be too old for Windows 10. According to Asus my motherboard is not really Windows 10 compatible. I also could not install the latest chipset drivers with the Intel Driver Utility ... it just gave me an error code which lead me nowhere.

And then there was even another thing which occured already: the error count from the Fireface USB Settings went up in extreme situations. Maybe I played a game and then the sound got clicks and they got worse. I looked at the settings dialogue and the number went from 0/0 to 0/1000 and further ... later it was even something like 3/4000 and there were total audio drop outs. This situation only occured while or after I played a game in ma spare time though. Maybe the issues might be graphics card related after all? Ar there any options to have some kind of log what kind of errors there are listed?

The barely and sporadic clicks in the system (Windows Media Player, YouTube, etc.) did not show errors in the settings dialogue though.


At this point I am really lost. What could be my next steps to solve the problem and be able to produce with 100% NO single audio clicks and pops again? Are there any additional tests I could do?

My system specs:

Motherboard: Asus P6T SE
Audiointerface: RME Babyface (Firmware 223, Driver 1.099)
OS: Windows 10 Home 64 bit
CPU: Intel i7 950 @ 4x 3.07 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7900 GHz Edition
RAM: 8 GB
DAW: FL Studio 12.5.1 [build 2]


I hope I did not forget details and I really hope that somebody will be able to help me, while I know that it might be very difficult, since its about very sporadic and barely audible clicks. Thanks for the effort!

All the best,
Manuel

Tagirijus's Website

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2017-09-19 16:10:20)

  • ramses
  • DAW Mastermind
  • Offline
  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 12,894

Re: Babyface sporadic clicks (without ASIO as well)

My personal opineon, go back to Win7 if you can.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • From: Deutschland
  • Registered: 2017-09-19
  • Posts: 2

Re: Babyface sporadic clicks (without ASIO as well)

Hi ramses, thanks for your reply. I know that this might be quite naiv now and not professional from me and totally not well-grounded, but: I somehow think this might not solve the problem, since the clicks and pops existed on Win7 as well. )=

Tagirijus's Website

4 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2017-09-19 18:34:33)

  • ramses
  • DAW Mastermind
  • Offline
  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 12,894

Re: Babyface sporadic clicks (without ASIO as well)

Tagirijus wrote:

Hi ramses, thanks for your reply. I know that this might be quite naiv now and not professional from me and totally not well-grounded, but: I somehow think this might not solve the problem, since the clicks and pops existed on Win7 as well. )=

You said you installed Win10 to get a new installion by this.
From this I deduce that your Win7 installation was not in good shape and you sounded the same.

It might be the case, that your PC runs fine under Win7
- if you would have cleaned up stuff or
- by a new installation (with proper drivers, BIOS settings, Windows configuration, etc.)

The possibilities why something goes wrong can have many causes, one or more in combination:
BIOS, drivers, hardware, programs that keep the system busy, etc.

I generally still recommend installation of Windows 7 for audio because Win7 is very stable and mature.
Only with Win7 you  can configure "Windows Update" to only install security patches. This gives a lot of stability !

In contrast to that Win10 is a "moving target". Nobody can escape the updates anymore,
which is not so good for audio stability. Win10 = "Windows as a Service" introduces simply too many changes.
Another thing is that many people feel more comfortably to fine tune Win7 for audio...
Some things are also different with Win10. Quick boot times are achieved by not doing a complete fresh boot.
Win10 makes some trickeries to quicker load some stuff, which can be disabled. Dont remember it exact.
All I can tell is that I still refuse to migrate my Audio Workstation from 7 to 10 and it pays out at least for me.

Your decision to deploy a SSD is a good idea, but this doesnt help you with the problems, when they are in different areas.

1. 1st of all I would try ALL USB2 and USB3 ports of your system, to connect the Babyface, whether the issues go away.
Only connect keyboard and mouse for this test.
1.1 take another quality cable
1.2 try to connect Babyface to other PC to validate proper installation there.
But of course also this machine might have issues.

2. BIOS: ensure that energy saving is disabled. Only C0/C1. No T-States. Perhaps also disable Turbo and EIST. Check with CPU-Z that your CPU clock stays stable. Clock changes cause latency, until the clock is stable again. See also my blog article, what I did for my system: http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … X10SRi-F/.
Eventually, if things look stable with CPU-Z and LatencyMon you can enable turbo and EIST again.
On my system under load I get Base clock + 100 Mhz instantly = 3.6 Ghz.

3. Win7: choose High Performance Power Profile and optimize Win7 for background services

4. Disable CPU core parking

5. Devices like USB- Bluetooth, WLAN adapter can generate a lot of interrupts.

On Win7 with LatencyMon v4.02 check, under an IDLE system where nothing runs (no applications, only test program)
whether your systems kernel timer latency stays under 100 microseconds.

On my system the smallest values are around 2.6 microseconds, often between 10-20, over longer time (5min) under 100.

These low timings tell you that the CPU cores have enough headroom to run threads/processes and are not blocked by other programs or drivers. BTW, bad drivers can block a core, as windows is not a real time system. A low level driver can not be interrupted by process scheduler. If a driver is badly written, not following certain driver programming conventions, then it keeps a core too long busy. If also an audio driver or process is on this core, then you easily can get audio drops.
LatencyMon can also tell you which drivers keep Core busy for a longer time.

In a good case of luck only a few BIOS settings, driver changes, etc will do the trick, in a bad case of luck you need to look deeper, and all of this takes time.

My personal "gut feeling" is that with Win7 you come quicker to success and once you have it, that it stays more stable for a longer time, if only security updates are being deployed to the system ...

My Win7 system is optimzed for audio. It runs stable since Oct 2014. 3y !!
Although I install and deinstall SW a lot its still in very good shape including best LatencyMon values.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2017-08-11
  • Posts: 13

Re: Babyface sporadic clicks (without ASIO as well)

I won't argue with the "go back to Win 7" advice, but it's not something I'd do personally.  I'm not an audio pro and my machine gets used by my kids (and me) for gaming and internet browsing, so dropping back to W7 would be a bad solution for me.  But if you're in a studio environment looking for stability and consistency it's a different story.

One idea that I didn't see listed here has to do with how the system is assigning interrupts.

In Win 10 place your cursor in the little Cortana bar in the bottom left, right next to the start menu.  Type "device manager" and hit enter and it will bring up the device manager.  Click on the "View" menu item at the top and then "Resources by Connection".
Then click on the "Interrupt request (IRQ)" item below to expand the list of Interrupt assignments.

There will be a very long list of interrupt assignments.  Scroll all the way down to the bottom.
What you want to look for is the (PCI) interrupt assignments.  You want to make sure that you don't have multiple things attached to the same interrupt number.

In particular, look for the interrupt assigned to your graphics card (should say Radeon HD 7900 or something like that) and make sure it's not the same interrupt that your USB (probably something like Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller).

It's probably OK if you have something like "High Definition Audio Controller" on the same interrupt as your graphics card because that's for the audio ports built into your motherboard.  The worst scenario is USB and graphics on the same interrupt.