Hello all,

I'm experiencing audio dropouts with the pci version of the HDSP MADI. All drivers and firmware are up to date. The problem (random glitches, light stuttering) happens constantly when using mme-drivers in windows to playback as much as one stereo wavfile. It get's slightly better when adjusting buffersize, but even at 2048 it isn't relyable. The problem isn't clockrelated, as I've set the card to master and monitored via the card's headphone output and the problem still persists. The CPU peaks at a maximum of 20%, averaging at 3%. When using asio in Cubase SX3 I've found that increasing the 'audio preload amount' to the maximum value of 6 seconds gives me a much lower CPU load and less or sometimes no problems. All this time the asio buffersize has been at a very conservative 1024 samples. So it seems that I can at least run my audio software without problems, but still it makes me wonder: I should be able to playback wav's in mediaplayer without hickups, and in my previous setup I've never had to use an audio preload amount that's bigger than the default 2 seconds in Cubase. Could there be something at fault in my system? I'm using a new ASUS P5K-E motherboard, intel core 2 duo 6850 CPU, 4 Gig DDR-2 667MHz RAM, ASUS EN8600GT graphics (PCI express Graphics slot), system drive is IDE, audio drives a mirrored SATA RAID set. Windows XP 32 bit professional, SP2, totally up to date. All the latest drivers, Cubase SX3. I've tried playing back audio from different disks, no difference. I've checked for IRQ conflicts, and tried the card in all three available PCI slots, no difference. Since the PC is ACPI you can't change IRQ's, but I've checked and the card is now sharing IRQ 18 with the USB controllers and is not on the same bus as the graphics card / raid controller, so I think that shouldn't be the problem, correct me if I'm wrong! My best educated guess is that something is forcing me to use extreme large disk buffers for relyable audio playback, and at least the asio driver gives you the option to change the amount of buffering. The windows MME driver, however, probably(??) uses a fixed buffer which isn't cutting it for me at the moment. The only way to lighten the burden on my system is to use extreme high audio buffer settings in the driver settings window, but that still isn't enough. I hope I've been able to explain the problem, if you'd like further info, just let me know!

Thank you for helping, regards, Wessel.