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