1 Topic by bigtone studios (edited by bigtone studios 2020-05-16 05:30:11)

  • Registered: 2020-05-16
  • Posts: 9

Topic: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

hi all,

everything worked perfectly on win 7, but i just migrated from win 7 to win 10. everything is working fast and flawlessly so far.
the only thing i experience is rather quiet but clearly noticable clicks, roughly all 30 to 40 seconds, when playing back audio from studio one. it only happens when playing back audio. if nothing is playing, there's perfect silence.

  • i updated the hdsp driver to the latest.

  • i updated graphics drivers to the latest.

  • i made the usual, recommended audio optimisation settings to windows 10 (uac off, energy settings to max power, etc).
    the only audio driver used is the rme asio driver . no system based audio driver is active.

the problem still persists.
i use a creamware a16 (the old 16bit one) in 16 out ad/da converter, which is connected to the pcie interface by 4 lightpipes (though i doubt that this is the problem, as, as i said, the clicks only occur if i play back audio files (mostly 16 or 24 bit wave files from various sample librarys).
the settings window of the interface shows "sync" on both adat ins (i don't use the third one - it's not installed).
btw - what's better in this case - sync or lock?
i use adat 1 in as clock source, both, the converter and the interface are on 44.1khz.
buffersize is set to 128 samples. that's the setting i use since my very first rme card over 20 years ago (project hammerfall) - always worked flawlessly right out of the box.
sooo... what am i doing wrong?
i hope you can help me, as i'm running out of ideas...


here's my system specs:

Operating System
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
    Intel Core i5 4590 @ 3.30GHz    38 °C
    Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
    16,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
    Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. Z97X-UD3H-CF (SOCKET 0)    26 °C
Graphics
    HE247DPB (1920x1080@59Hz)
    HE247DPB (1920x1080@59Hz)
    S24D590 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    Intel HD Graphics 4600 (Gigabyte)
    2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (Gigabyte)    27 °C
    SLI Disabled
Storage
    931GB Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SCSI Disk Device (SSD)    27 °C
    1863GB Seagate ST2000DM 001-1ER164 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)    34 °C
    1863GB Seagate ST2000DM 001-1ER164 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)    33 °C
    931GB Western Digital WD Elements 10A8 USB Device (SSD)    27 °C
Optical Drives
    ELBY CLONEDRIVE SCSI CdRom Device
    HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24NSC0 SCSI CdRom Device
Audio
    NVIDIA High Definition Audio



kind regards,
nico from bigtone sonddesign

kind regards,
nico

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2020-05-16 10:59:09)

  • ramses
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Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

Did you already perform LatencyMon measurements on an IDLE system to find out, whether one or more drivers are causing high DPC and by this are blocking CPU cores for audio too much ?

Your CPU offers (only) 4 CPU cores (without hyperthreading) at relatively low clock speds of 3.3 GHz. With only 4 cores the likeliness for an audio process to become scheduled to a core which might be blocked by potentially too long lassting DPC might be higher.

You say with Windows 7 you didn't have these issues .. well with Windows 10 you have other drivers and surely some things have changed in the Windows kernel .. That could be a direction which is worth to do further investigations.

In regards to system tuning, did you also optimize BIOS settings ? Before performing any changes make photos of the current settings.

Its important to deactivate anything in the field of energy saving, because this creates lag inside of the system and makes it work less efficient, so that the likelyness for audio drops is increased.

Typically you should disable C-States by either "disabling" them or setting it to "C0/C1" which means that the CPU may not enter any sleep states for the sake of energy saving. Because it takes simply too much time, to wake it up.

Some BIOSes also have T- and P-States which should simply be "disabled".

Also deactivate enhanced halt state (C1E) which is also for power saving and creates unwanted lag.

It can also help to priotize background services in Windows. This changes the way the process scheduler works and gives all processes a longer and equal time slice compareable to service systems, so that the processes get some more CPU time to get the job done. I put together some information about this in this blog article: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … es-or-not/

It can also help to disable CPU core parking, which is per default enabled on a Windows 10 system.
Bitsum offers a tool to tweak energy profiles and to disable the parking of CPU cores which causes lag:
https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/

Windows 10 introduces also some Apps, which still run in the bachkground and cause CPU and interrupt load, also network load if they update some online information. This is one of several things that you can silence with the O&O Tool Win10 Shutup. It also helps to turn off some of the Microsoft data collection "features".
You need to run it for the "Administrator" user separately, if you have re-activated this user to ensure, that your own user has no administrator rights.
https://www.oo-software.com/de/shutup10

Further information regarding Resplendence's tool "LatencyMon":
Resplendence also tells that some users reported latency issues on their system caused by CPU power management features that introduce a variable CPU clock. Disabling features like: Intel Speedstep, Intel TurboBoost can help to solve this.
So watch your CPU clock .. a permanent stable clock is more beneficial ...

In case you never worked with LatencyMon. Take your time to read the documentation, that this site offers to you, and try to understand for what purpose this tool is.
This tool simulates a real audio load, so you may not start a DAW or any other application, this tool does its own load test. Therefore I said, measure on an IDLE system, doing nothing. Just logged in and no mouse movements, as also this generates additional Interrupts on your system.

This tool meanwhile supports 3 different measuring methods. "kernel latency timer" only works reliably on Windows 7, this one you can't use with Windows 8 or 10 anymore and leads to wrong results.

Here an example: 5 minutes of meausring
With these tool settings: Tools -> Options -> "Interrupt to DPC latency"
System has to be IDLE and energy profile needs to be "high performance" like when working with audio ...


https://www.dropbox.com/s/6kaq95smxtavf1w/2020-05-16%20-%20Win10-1909%20-%20IRQ-2-DPC%20-%205min%20-%20Overview.jpg?dl=1


https://www.dropbox.com/s/5id1pfxpzg1tw8e/2020-05-16%20-%20Win10-1909%20-%20IRQ-2-DPC%20-%205min%20-%20Drivers%20Report.jpg?dl=1


The "report text" which also contains some useful information:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jubqygbyjwq4i … t.txt?dl=1

How to use LatencyMon: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon_using

Some quotes:

"The report view displays a conclusion of the suitability of your system for playing real-time audio at the top. If the execution times of all DPC and ISR routines stay below 2000 µs (microseconds), your system is considered suitable for handling real-time audio without dropouts. If some routines have execution times between 2000 µs and 4000 µs, your system is considered doubtful. If ISR or DPC routines are detected to execute for longer than 4000 µs, a system is considered unsuitable for handling real-time audio. Note that these numbers are just chosen arbitrarily. For optimal midi to audio latencies, buffer sizes of a sound card and driver should be set to very low values then only very low execution times of DPCs and ISRs become acceptable."

"To reduce midi to audio latencies (that is the time between a key press on a MIDI keyboard and the occurrence of the actual sound), the audio buffer size of the audio driver should be as low as possible. But it must be supportable by the system. The acceptable limit of 2000µs for DPC and ISR execution times has been arbitrarily chosen. The lower your audio buffer size, the lower the tolerance for long execution times of DPC and ISR routines and page fault resolution. In order to retain a system that does not drop out you may need to increase your audio buffer size. So it might be that your system is not suitable for low midi to audio latency but you might still be able to find an acceptable balance that works."

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14
  • Registered: 2020-05-16
  • Posts: 9

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

hi ramses,
thanks for your indepth explanation. that's a lot to work through for someone who has a rather normal knowledge about computersystems. meanwhie - here's the latency monitor 5min test with the preference settings you said to be used - what do you say?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l404a5j6yute0 … 1.png?dl=0

kind regards,
nico

4 Reply by bigtone studios (edited by bigtone studios 2020-05-17 07:14:20)

  • Registered: 2020-05-16
  • Posts: 9

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

...as i couldn't manage either the image embedding, nor was i allowed to put more than one link into a post, here's the second screenshot with the driver page:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdemb748bay3m … 2.png?dl=0

do you by any chance see something unusual?

kind regards,
nico

5 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2020-05-17 09:32:55)

  • ramses
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Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

I see no issues with LatencyMon in this 5 minutes trace. As Windows 10 got frequent updates by M$ in the past I think it would be better to use the latest version of LatencyMon for measuring, v6.71 (you have 6.51).

Maybe you need to run LatencyMon for longer than 5 minutes, not all Latency "spikes" happen within 5 minutes on an IDLE system..

When do the klicks appear .. very quickly or rare ?
Do they only appear when working with the DAW ?
Are other applications running as well when you have the clicks ?
Do you access the network while recording ?
Does this PC have a wireless card ?

How about the status of the proposed actions ...
If you see it as kind of a todo list, whats useful/required to do.

What has been done, what is missing ?

Priority have these actions:
- the BIOS settings, this is very important to deactivate energy saving for the CPU
- CPU core parking should be disabled in Windows
- Did you try to set Windows to optimize for background services (this is a "misnomer", I gave you the
  blog article which explains whats behind it)

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14
  • Registered: 2020-05-16
  • Posts: 9

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

ramses wrote:

I see no issues with LatencyMon in this 5 minutes trace. As Windows 10 got frequent updates by M$ in the past I think it would be better to use the latest version of LatencyMon for measuring, v6.71 (you have 6.51).
will update and let it run for a longer time.

Maybe you need to run LatencyMon for longer than 5 minutes, not all Latency "spikes" happen within 5 minutes on an IDLE system..

ok, will update and let it run for half an hour - is that long enough? or should i let it run overnight entirely?

ramses wrote:

When do the klicks appear .. very quickly or rare ?

around roughly 30-40 sec, and quite quiet. only a tiny click. not loud, not really obtrusive and not frequent, only one small click at a time.

ramses wrote:

Do they only appear when working with the DAW ?

actually now that you said it, i checked, and as far as i can say it only happens with studio one. i changed the internal precision in the audio performance preferences from 32 bit to 64 bit in studio one, and it seems to be a lot better now - as far as i checked it for around 10 min straight listening to an audio file without overtones so i can identify the clicking better - i encountered no clicks during these 10 min. will check more in depth tomorrow. but it smells kinda fishy that i have to switch to 64 internal precision anyway, as my win 7 system was 64 bit, too, and there it flawlessly worked with 32 bit. i don't know what this is there fore exacly anyway... i might need to look that up.

ramses wrote:

Are other applications running as well when you have the clicks ?

no, or at least mostly not. if i incorporate my hardware synths, i might occasionally use sound diver as an editor in parallel to studio one for editing or creating sounds on the hardware rack devices. but since quite some times i did not incorporate any hardware - certainly not since i switched to win10 four weeks ago...

ramses wrote:

Do you access the network while recording ?

yes - i need to, as i have another machine (a macbook) for internet browsing, emailing, video conferencing, etc (though it is mounted as a drive). i need it, in order to have conversations with my clients and i wouldn't want to do that on my music pc. however, i do have to transfer files from and to the internet mac quite frequently, so i need the network connection established. or is there an easy way to switch it on and off whe i need/don't need it, maybe from a keybinding or a shortcut on the desktop?

ramses wrote:

Does this PC have a wireless card ?

no. it's onboard the gigaybyte mainboard.

ramses wrote:

How about the status of the proposed actions ...
If you see it as kind of a todo list, whats useful/required to do.

What has been done, what is missing ?

well, a lot of what is kind of proposed by you simply leaves my knowledge about pc's and windows entirely, so i would want to wait with these tweaks until a good friend of mine, who is a pc geek, is actually sitting right next to me, to prevent myself from doing anything harmful to my system by these tweaks.


ramses wrote:

Priority have these actions:
- the BIOS settings, this is very important to deactivate energy saving for the CPU

this is off.

ramses wrote:

- CPU core parking should be disabled in Windows

it was on, i turned it off by a registry tweak tutorial video i found by googling.
though that didn't change the behavior - but maybe it's good anyway, as there might have come up other situations where this would have been an issue, so it's good that you told me.

ramses wrote:

- Did you try to set Windows to optimize for background services (this is a "misnomer", I gave you the
  blog article which explains whats behind it)

if you mean the processor scheduling, yes, that is set to background services. i know the usual tweaks - i am working with rme pci interfaces since (i believe) 97, when the first card came out (project hammerfall) for win xp. and the reason why i did stick with rme since then was, that, with the typical, usual tweaks these cards ran without any issues whatsoever. actually this is the first ever issue i had since using rme.

man, thanks a lot for your extensive will to help. really appreciated.

if still something comes to your mid upon reading my answers, please do not hesitate to shoot...

kind regards,
nico
  • ramses
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Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

Did I understood right ? The very short audio losses only happen with Studio One every 30-40s ?
And are not visible in LatencyMon ? Then I would say its an application problem.

Maybe Studio One behaves differently under Win10.
Does it make a difference if you activate or deactivate MMCSS ?

You can leave network adapter on. But I would not use the network while recording, because this generates additional interrupts and by this ISR and DPC. The execution of drivers has highest Prio on a Windows system and a driver allocates a CPU core as long as it is coded in the driver (simply "programming conventions").

It can come to the situation, that a driver allocates the CPU core a little too long. Maybe you have even set ASIO buffersize too low, so that the CPU has to perform i/o more often (which additionally creates higher CPU load and even more interrupt processing, in this case by the audio driver).
Well and when an audio process has been scheduled to use a certain CPU core and this core is currently busy by executing "low level routines" with highest prio (driver code), then it can come to a situation that audio (which has real-time demands) is not being processed in time, then you hear audio drops.

This can always happen on a system if the DAW project becomes too CPU intensive or if you are using too small ASIO buffers.

So its kind of a "virtue" (and skill) to set up a PC right, with proper BIOS settings, good Hardware and drivers.
The better this part has been fulfilled, the less problems you have later when working with audio.
You will be able to use lower ASIO buffersizes compared to other not so good set-up PCs, because your PC can work more efficient and is not blocked by bad drivers or bad settings.

Us guys doing recording are only a nieche market .. most people do not have any issue with energy saving stuff, because for normal PC work it doesn't matter whether a compute workload happens a littler earlier or a little later.
And .. Windows is no "real-time" operating system, same for Apple.
Therefore we need to be selective about computer hardware and drivers.

So then wait for your friend and I hope you get it solved. It might help to cross check with another DAW like reaper or cubase to get a better feeling whats being caused by Studio one itself. But take a Demo of another DAW program for comparison. The authors of audio players with ASIO support usually do not have much experience to properly interact with an ASIO driver. You are more on the safe side when using another DAW like Cubase or Reaper.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14
  • Registered: 2020-05-16
  • Posts: 9

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

hi ramses,
yes, that all i know... i'm in that business professionally since 1989, doing this for my living... so i'm not _that_ nooby and usually i get most problems solved. but here it's something i am stuck with. however, i _think_ i solved it. studio one was running with internal precision of 32 bit. which to me means, that it has to "translate" on an x64 system. so i switched to 64 bit internal precision and listened for 10 min - no clicks occured during this time. so tonight i'll be normally working and i'll eventually see, if that was the problem - it sounds plausible to me at least. the only thing i am asking myself is - my win 7 was x64, too... and i always had internal precision of studio one set to 32 bit (and forgot about it actually) - and it worked flawlessly. so the explanation i give myself is, that something in win 10 has changed, so that using 32 bit internal precision does create problems. i'll see if switching the internal precision to 64 bit solved the problem.

one last question:
do you perhaps know of a way or a program, where you can easily with a click of a button or a keystroke switch the network on and off? because i would gladly turn it of in general, but switch it on, when necessary.

btw, here's the new testrun with latmon 6.71, in case you would want to have another look at it. it ram over half an hour. let me know if you see something that is unusual in a bad way.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k5bt9k6bwrmei … s.zip?dl=0

thanks again for your indepth help.

kind regards,
nico
  • Registered: 2017-08-11
  • Posts: 7

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

bigtone studios wrote:

hi ramses,
yes, that all i know... i'm in that business professionally since 1989, doing this for my living... so i'm not _that_ nooby and usually i get most problems solved. but here it's something i am stuck with. however, i _think_ i solved it. studio one was running with internal precision of 32 bit. which to me means, that it has to "translate" on an x64 system. so i switched to 64 bit internal precision and listened for 10 min - no clicks occured during this time. so tonight i'll be normally working and i'll eventually see, if that was the problem - it sounds plausible to me at least. the only thing i am asking myself is - my win 7 was x64, too... and i always had internal precision of studio one set to 32 bit (and forgot about it actually) - and it worked flawlessly. so the explanation i give myself is, that something in win 10 has changed, so that using 32 bit internal precision does create problems. i'll see if switching the internal precision to 64 bit solved the problem.

one last question:
do you perhaps know of a way or a program, where you can easily with a click of a button or a keystroke switch the network on and off? because i would gladly turn it of in general, but switch it on, when necessary.

btw, here's the new testrun with latmon 6.71, in case you would want to have another look at it. it ram over half an hour. let me know if you see something that is unusual in a bad way.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k5bt9k6bwrmei … s.zip?dl=0

thanks again for your indepth help.

Hi Bigtone studios !

Did you manage to fix your clicking issues ?

I recently upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and I'm experiencing the very same issue. I was using HDSP9652 with Audient ID22 as a DA/monitor controller, I was clocking it to HDSP9652 no problem, everything worked flawlessly. I had problems with ID22's drivers on Win7, hence I got HDSP9652. But right now on Win10, ID22 drivers actually work glitch free, but HDSP9652 clicks a little... I mean I can ditch HDSP9652 totally, but I really got used on DIGICHECK.

10 Reply by alonzo86 (edited by alonzo86 2022-04-06 12:16:39)

  • Registered: 2017-08-11
  • Posts: 7

Re: occasional clicks with hdsp 9652 pcie on win 10

If someone is interested to know, seems that I solved this problem by updating my RX650 graphic driver to the latest version. Seems that somehow it was bothering HDSP9652.