Topic: Babyface Pro fs operating on Thunderbolt port

A bit of info on why, just to get that out of the way. My studio is in transition. A Lenovo laptop with an i9 10800 2.4 gHz CPU with two TB3 ports is running my software, Cubase 15, Wavelab 12 and Spectralayers 12. No other Daw software other than UAD vst, Slate VSX, Toontrack SD3, EZ Drummer 3 plugins are installed and authorized.

I normally am interfaced with a Rev 1 HDSPe MADI card in a Sonnet PCIe>TB3 chassis and life is good.

I have been ill recently and literally need to work from my bed so I have interfaced my 2020 Babyface Pro fs to one of the TB ports of the Lenovo and it is working. I have an external, high speed USB3 hard drive interfacing the other TB port on the machine. Cubase, Wavelab and Spectralayers all load and stream audio. Totalmix buffers are set to 2038 samples

I am using Hear.com (Plugin Alliance) in the last output insert and VSX as the insert before that. The reason VSX is before the Hear.com plugin is because the Hear.com plugin is corrective. I am a 75 yo guy with hearing deficits and this is like a dream come true. I can hear as clearly as I did in my 20’s. It is amazing. It also is extremely CPU intensive and Wavelab will start streaming but the controls freeze and I have to Cntrl>alt>delete to close out. I want to believe that I won’t have this issue when I can access my MADI/TB3 chassis.

Thanks for reading this far. My question is, since I cannot access my Sonnet TB chassis, does interfacing a USB3 connection to a TB port throttle the I/O streaming capabilities in excess of 10 MBs?

MADIFX, M-32AD M-32DA, M-16DA, 2xADI-8QSM, ADI-648, ADI 192 DD, ADI-2, MadiFace Pro, Babyface Pro fs

Re: Babyface Pro fs operating on Thunderbolt port

Those USB-C ports must support both USB and Thunderbolt since both your USB devices work on them.

Your problem isn’t likely to be caused by the port for the Babyface “throttling”, but it’s worth ensuring you’re on the latest Babyface driver and firmware.

Did this software configuration work with your Sonnet chassis or did you only start using this software with the Babyface?

3 (edited by Redcliff 2026-01-08 02:25:09)

Re: Babyface Pro fs operating on Thunderbolt port

It does support USB. This laptop only had the MADI fx drivers installed for the last two years.

The Babyface driver install was done and was successful. Firmware is up to date.

The issue was that I was streaming from an external Sandisk USB 3 SSD interfacing the second TB port. It is a fast drive but I just copied the audio files to my dedicated internal 2gB NVMe project drive. That is less than 10% capacity right now and it’s a different world now.

MADIFX, M-32AD M-32DA, M-16DA, 2xADI-8QSM, ADI-648, ADI 192 DD, ADI-2, MadiFace Pro, Babyface Pro fs

Re: Babyface Pro fs operating on Thunderbolt port

Excellent, glad to hear you solved it.