KVR Audio

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 11:52 am

Hi, I recently bought a saffire pro 24 DSP and I'm having issues with it.

The audio stream drops out every few seconds on my laptop, when hooked either to the built in 4-pin Ricoh FW, or to a dedicated Texas Instruments expresscard FW (windows 7 32 bit, all drivers up to date, all other devices disconnected in the device manager).

I'd like to assemble a desktop DAW that works with the saffire, so I'd really like satisfied owners of Saffire products to report here their hardware specs (motherboard models, CPU, RAM, FW PCI-X extension boards, power supply, operating systems), and the tightest ASIO settings at which the Saffire is stable (sample rate and asio buffer sizes).

Thanks a lot.

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 2:28 pm

as long as you have a TI firewire (either onboard the motherboard or as an add in it will be fine)
laptops would be a no go unless you had a known to work with firewire laptop.

the Saffire is NOT known for low latency... so dont expect much.

Scott
ADK

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 2:56 pm

Hi Scott, thanks for jumping in.

I have a fairly decent ASUS laptop (core2duo T9300 @ 2.5MHz, 6Mb L2, 3Gigs@800MHz, intel 965 express chipset, dedicated nvidia GeForce 9500M GPU, WD caviar black 7200rpm SATA drive), with an on-board 4-pin Ricoh Chipset. I started using this one first, and ended buying a TI ExpressCard because of dropouts.

I'm having the same dropouts using the TI (if not worse), under windows 7 32 bit.

Here is all I've done to try to make it work :

- install legacy FW driver as advised by focusrite
- in device manager, disabled everything except saffire:
- WIFI, Ethernet, USB webcam, modem, all USB concentrators/ports, internal realtek HD codec, fingerprint reader
- made sure the TI controller was not sharing IRQ or I/O ressources
- in system prefs, gave priority to background services

So the saffire is literally the only peripheral on the system in this configuration!

I'm using REAPER as DAW. looping through a test mix made of 1 EZdrummer track + 1 TAL synth bass line, I get dropouts every seconds so to say, even with buffers set @512. The DPC latency checker shows yellow and red peaks that precisely correspond to the dropouts.

On the same system, I can run the test mix with no glitches @64 buffers with asio4all on the realtek, and @128 buffers on a line6 toneport UX2, DPC latency checker staying cool.

This really makes me believe there is some serious hardware dependent bug in the saffire driver itself.

I was going to build a corei7 1156 rig on top of a gigabyte P55 UD4 mobo with win7, but I'd like to get confirmation first that the rig will support the saffire!

cheers

UltraJv · Post by **UltraJv** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 2:59 pm

Have you made sure that in that you are running in high performance mode in power options? EIST or CPU power saving can cause trouble. High performance mode will switch that off.

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 3:15 pm

Yup, I chose the High Performance profile in the Power4Gear utility provided by ASUS. So both cores are running at full speed, no dynamic frequency shifting.

Thanks for pointing that out anyway!

UltraJv · Post by **UltraJv** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 3:26 pm

There are other users of that card who have the same problem. Have you tried uninstalling the Asus power 4 gear utility? That was the cause of one issue. Sometimes utils cause trouble. The other current thread with the issue is here :

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... highlight=

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 3:35 pm

Googling around, I found some posts by some people who claimed that the DVD player was causing the dropouts on their laptops.

The only thing I haven't disabled in the device manager is the DVD player. I'll try that tonight.

UltraJv · Post by **UltraJv** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 3:46 pm

monsterbeetle wrote:Googling around, I found some posts by some people who claimed that the DVD player was causing the dropouts on their laptops.

The only thing I haven't disabled in the device manager is the DVD player. I'll try that tonight.

Its possible, Windows on some configurations call poll the DVD drives around once a second. Autoplay maybe? This can be turned off by inserting a disk and then deselecting the option "Use autoplay for all media"

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:08 pm

This really makes me believe there is some serious hardware dependent bug in the saffire driver itself.

its not the saffire this is the norm for newer laptops and firewire. they flat out dont work. unless you buy one known to work (would not be any name brands) or go USB interface and then even still it may not work very well.

I was going to build a corei7 1156 rig on top of a gigabyte P55 UD4 mobo with win7, but I'd like to get confirmation first that the rig will support the saffire!

as i said as long as it has TI firewire the UD4 has TI firewire.

Scott

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:26 pm

what really sucks is that to make my 400€ audio interface work I have to shell out another 1000€ for a new computer altogether... without any certainty of results

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:50 pm

some people have guaranteed to work for audio laptops

koolkeys · Post by **koolkeys** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 5:44 pm

FWIW, I just bought a Saffire Pro 24(not the DSP version) and it works just fine on:

Intel i5
8GM Corsair DDR3 RAM
Two Seagate Barracuda internal drives(750GB and 1.5TB)
Radeon x1950XT 256MB video card(technically unsupported on this system, but runs fine)
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
PCI Firewire card(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6815124003)

This is NOT a TI chipset card, but it works fine. I haven't noticed any problems at all, FWIW. Also, I'm not running any type of legacy driver, but the beta driver from Focusrite at beta.focusrite.com

I also tried the Saffire on my laptop using the 4-pin adapter, and didn't notice any problems there either. Keep in mind I haven't used it nearly as much, but in the time I did use it, no problem(outside of the laptop not being that powerful in the first place). Here are the specs:

Core2Duo 1.83gHz
3GB DDR2 RAM
Vista Home Premium 32-bit.
250GB internal SATA 5400RPM laptop drive

It's an HP laptop, so I have no idea what FW chipset it uses. But I've never had issues with this or my Onyx Satellite that I had.

Hope this helps.

Brent

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 5:56 pm

Hi Brent! thanks for your input.

could you please provide the exact ref of the motherboard you're using your i5 on?

koolkeys · Post by **koolkeys** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 5:59 pm

monsterbeetle wrote:Hi Brent! thanks for your input.

could you please provide the exact ref of the motherboard you're using your i5 on?

Sure! It's this one:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... =M452-6072

No onboard firewire, so I use the card I linked to above.

It's custom built by me, so no funky power saving software or anything else involved. Just a stock Windows 7 install.

Brent

monsterbeetle · Post by **monsterbeetle** » Mon Jan 11, 2010 6:25 pm

By the way, I just installed the new 2.0beta driver and it brought a noticeable improvement wrt dropouts, they now only happen once in a while like every 10 to 20 seconds instead of every second.

The only sad thing is that the very short buffer sizes have disappeared.

UPDATE : everything working stable now !!!!

removed legacy Firewire driver, installed the stock win7, installed saffire 2.0b1 driver, installed ASIO4ALL 2.10b1, the saffire now works flawlessly through ASIO4ALL @196 samples, Roundtrip I/O latency below 15ms, with firewire driver latency set to short in the saffire control application.

strangely, using ASIO4ALL allows me to get lower latencies than the saffire driver itself directly.

Thanks a lot to all of you for helping me out! I knew it was a software only problem, looks like focusrite is really going in the right direction with these new drivers!!!

btw the VRM thing is pretty cool. I was feeling like the sound was coming from outside my headpones for a moment.

Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP hardware compatibility list