I am well aware of WLAN and LAN giving large latency spikes and causing audio pops and clicks during playback. On my machine, my USB WLAN adapter will give a large spike every 2 seconds when it's plugged in. This is the whole reason I use a USB adapter, so when I'm done getting what I need, I can unplug it, and go back to 90-100us steady.

Tell me your experience you've had, what it was, and what you did to cure it? This will help me with a conversation I'm having with someone else, so I appreciate your feedback.

Devon

My motherboard has double Realtek 1000Mbit fast LAN controller, I guess it's stellar for gaming, but I had to turn it off to get good latency. I have been testing various drivers, but it was a no go. I found some old PCI 100Mbit LAN card in a crate, so I pushed it into my only PCI slot and now I have happy average 7us with spikes up to 40us.

btw. I'm plugged to wireless LAN too, using external AP box, this is the way to go and these devices are rather inexpensive.

On my HP Win 7 64 bit machine I do get a spike in every 30 sec or so. Latency Monitor app says it's because of TCPIP.SYS. I haven't dug deeper and done anything yet to fix it. I just switch off the network adapter while using the DAW.

Thank you. Anyone else? I know there are more of you out there.

Devon

Hi Devon,

This was a useful test for me to run so I'll document the results here. It's all very informal, but suggests to me that a wireless network can co-exist on an audio PC without causing any problems.

For Windows testing I use a pro audio PC build by AAVIMT (based in Melbourne, Australia). The specs are:

• Intel XEON E5 @ 3.2 GHz hex core
  
• Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 mobo
  
• 16 GB RAM
  
• Intel 520 SSD
  
• RME AIO PCIe audio interface
  
• Win 7 x64 Pro

Vin works his magic on the Windows configuration so it's tweaked for performance, but the Gbps network connection is always enabled. This PC has performed flawlessly since the day it was turned on, I have not experienced any issues with performance in the various hosts I use for testing.

DPC latency flat lines at around 40 - 45 when this machine is idle. Transferring an 8 GB folder from NAS to local system disk the DPC latency spikes to around 100 but is generally flat. Nothing that would interfere with audio performance but I haven't explicitly tested that.

Wireless network performance is similar. After disabling the ethernet adaptor and plugging in a D-Link Wireless N Nano, Win 7 finds the drivers automatically. Device configured to access the same NAS via wireless. Copying the same folder results in near identical DPC performance, spikes at 139.

<cancels folder transfer because it's going to take 2.5 hours!>

Have now configured an ad-hoc wireless network to test iPad + Alchemy Mobile remote control. Maximum spike at this point is 177 - well below the 500 mark - but is mostly hovering around 40 or less.

Connected Alchemy Mobile to Alchemy via the ad-hoc network. The performance is roughly the same. No serious spikes. Tested in Live 8.4b7 x64, also fine. Maximum spike during this last part of testing is 140, hovers around 40 or less.

Peace,
Andy.

This often has no solution is an architecture problem of the motherboard, as more devices and card slots has a greater are the chances of this happening. Sometimes the question is sort of the same, believe me.

Not had many problems myself. As far as I can remember, it's always the WLAN/Bluetooth. On one occasion I had trouble with ATI Radeon 4xxx series video card and some driver version. Falling back to older driver solved the issue.

I'm not saying that it can't work at all. However, WLAN/LAN cards are well known for causing the DPC latency spikes. There are certain motherboard chipsets that work well for audio and one's that don't. There are certain BIOS revisions that work well and some that don't. There are certain WLAN/LAN interfaces that work well for glitch-free audio and some that don't. You've got a good combo. I do not. Enough forum reading I believe proves that neither of our situations are rare. Are some fixable? Yes. Some are not. I know I've helped lots of people on the forums over the last decade try to get glitch free audio. Some machines just won't do it. There are also plenty of people I've seen on the forums that flat out refuse to have network connectivity for their DAW as well because of viruses, and such. That in and of itself helps the problem.

Bottom line, the "problem" isn't unique to any one machine. If WLAN/LAN is a priority to have on a DAW for whatever reason, it's something that needs to be investigated on your own machine or one you wish to purchase. Not everyone who works a DAW is technically proficient enough to diagnose, fix, or realize there is no fix. You can spend months chasing your tail for nothing. Just the way PC's are.

Devon

Depends mostly on the controller chip being designed and implimented well as well as to some extent how the driver / software side handles it.

The are some awesome ones out there that don't add to the load at all and then the are others that will send it absolutly up the wall. The are also some software clients that ship with them that can turn a working solution into tosh, but if you disable it and use the native windows solution it'll be fine.

The is however no real rule either way as far as brands go. Most of the solutions we use have a specfic RALink controller on them but it's one out of half a dozen chips they manufacture and the rest are fairly shoddy from a DPC point of view. Same goes for Intel Wifi too with only 1 out of the last 4 chipsets giving nice low results.

The problem you then have is you don't know which of those controllers will turn up on your wifi adaptor of choice... best bet is just to grab a known working solution where you can and run with it.

Ive never had a problem, until now!!

Just bought a secondhand Lenovo T60 2Gb Ram, 1.83Ghz dual core, RME Multiface Vista SP2. This machine should have absolutely no problem with the RME.
Basically I needed a laptop with a cardbus for the RME.
I used to use this flawlessly with a Toshiba Satellite 2Ghz mobile processor with only 512Gb ram.

I have tweaked the shit out of this Lenovo, disabled various services and all hardware that isnt required for audio or to keep the machine running.

Whilst this has helped reduce the pops and clicks theres still the occassional noise. DPC checker does show a spike every 30 seconds or so.

This machine doesnt get anywhere near as low a the DPC picture above.

Im hoping switching to Windows 7 will solve this problem.
Vista was preinstalled.

Im really pissed off about this as there are others with a similar setup and able to play/record multiple tracks without a glitch. Ive only tried with one track!!!! Crackles also affect the onboard sound.