Hi,

I have a problem with a HDSP 9652 PCI card. This may be a stupid configuration error but I've not used ADAT optical gear much so please bear with me. I bought the card a while ago off eBay (which may be part of the problem) and didn't really get a chance to test it properly until now. I've got it set up with a Soundcraft Digital 328 mixer in my studio and connected via the ADAT optical ports. 16 channels in and out connected via 4 standard optical leads. At first I got a lot of constant noise on all channels which I worked out was the time code being transmitted from the card to the mixer. Setting the card to autosync mode and the desk to master fixed this. They are both in sync at 48khz. It's silent when no audio is playing now as it should be.

Whenever I play audio from the computer it still has distortion and is badly clipping though. It also comes through on every playback channel simultaneously (explaining the clipping). I thought this was another mixer config problem but when you look in TotalMix the playback is showing up on all 16 output channel meters even though it's only routed to channels 1 and 2, like it's somehow bleeding over. I've spent ages fiddling with settings and nothing makes a difference.

I am a Linux user and also have a Windows XP partition dual boot. The problem is exactly the same on either OS and I can't work out if the card itself is faulty. I've tried updating the firmware via the Windows tool which fails every time. It says "erasing sector 0" and then "failed". The readme file says this can happen with some older cards and to keep trying until there is no more error message. After doing this about 20 times in a row I gave up. I don't think that's it.

So does anyone have any ideas what this could be? Either the card is faulty and needs to be sent to the factory or perhaps there is a hardware jumper I need to reset. It won't flash at all and I'm thinking this must be linked to the playback problem. Sorry for the long-winded explanation and thanks

Dan