Problems with recording audio on Windows laptops via Yamaha mixer and Zoom H2

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Hi everybody!

I'm a long-time Mac user in the fields of music recording and production, sound design etc. I'm pretty disappointed with Apple's products in the recent years and will probably sooner or later migrate to Windows. So bear with me if I report stupid things, my expertise for the last 15 years has been on Macs.

Recently I've been doing a workshop with kids with Ableton Live and Max/MSP; I've used two rental Windows laptops for the occasion, HP Pro Books with AMD Quad Core A8-7410-APU and 4GB RAM on Win 10 Pro, not killer machines but they ran Live 10 Suite pretty OK. Once I installed ASIO4ALL i could even use external MIDI controllers without noticeable latency. It only started to get weird once I tried to record audio.

I tried an external audio mixer with a USB interface (Yamaha MG 166 CX USB), and I got loud distortion and crackling, noise, until I set the buffer so high I got like 250ms of latency, but even then the noises did not stop and the signal sounded really distorted. Completely unuseable. According to the mixer's manual, do driver would need to be installed. So I thought maybe the problem would be on the mixer side, until I tried using the audio interface function of a Zoom H2 recorder and got pretty much the same results. Again, according to the manual, no driver would be needed for the H2.

I decided to to all the recording on my Macbook Pro with a firewire/Thunderbolt audio interface then, but I'm wondering what the problem was and how I could work around these problems. I would guess that the problem might be with Windows 10, as both the mixer and the H2 are pretty old and might not work with the newest system. Does anybody know anything about this? It can't be the built-in soundcard, as both the mixer and the H2 would work as separate audio interfaces. Or do you guys thing the laptops weren't up for the job?

Would really appreciate your input on this! Thanks very much.

Colin

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It wouldn't surprise me when the culprit turns out to be the builtin wifi adapters on those laptops. These are notorious for DPC Latency issues. Not much you can do about it I'm afraid, office laptops are not designed for realtime audio recording.
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dukeitch wrote: Recently I've been doing a workshop with kids with Ableton Live and Max/MSP; I've used two rental Windows laptops for the occasion, HP Pro Books with AMD Quad Core A8-7410-APU and 4GB RAM on Win 10 Pro, not killer machines but they ran Live 10 Suite pretty OK. Once I installed ASIO4ALL i could even use external MIDI controllers without noticeable latency. It only started to get weird once I tried to record audio.
It's either DPC latency from drivers in the system as Bert notes above, or the CPU is overloading due to being overwhelmed.

You can check for DPC issues by running latency monitor for 10 mins: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

You can check for CPU overloading by hitting "ctrl+alt+del" clicking on task manager and watching the performance meters whilst you work.

The CPU's in those laptops look to be pulling about 2600 in benchmarking with a single thread score of 900 which (which from memory, this is the best comparision I can give) is offering far less performance than say a Q6600 chip from over a decade ago.

Now, I suspect that yes, you are going to find a driver problem because arming and recording a track shouldn't tip it over. However, fixing it might be more trouble than it's worth because your trackcount on these laptops is going to fairly limited, even if you can get them into a perfect working state.
Last edited by Kaine on Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

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*Double post*

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Thanks for your replies, guys!

Unfortunately, I can't run any tests as I already returned the rental laptops. My guess now is on a driver issue as proposed by Bert. The laptops ran Live Suite 10 with an open editor window of a fairly large project in Max MSP/Max4Live while Live was playing back at least four and up to 6 tracks of audio with effects constantly before without a hitch at least on Live's CPU meter so a CPU issue is improbable.

What would I be looking for in a Win laptop suitable for recording? We're just talking about one stereo tracks. Are the Lenovo Thinkpads any better? Can you recommend something? Specialised audio laptops? I'll probably just rent the more expensive Macbooks the next time, but any hint would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Colin

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Only real way to be sure really is run the DPC checker I linked earlier, and it'll give you a driver pass/fail result. Getting a chance to run it however, is the hard part as I suspect there won't be many firms willing to let you do it on the shop floor. I guess if your leasing them, then it's already an open box and they might be a bit more accommodating to testing before taking them away.

We do specialized models, as do most of the custom builders simply because on the shelf models tend to be churned quicker than we can test them and we get to control what's inside with self-built models. I dare say through they'd be rather overkill for what seems on paper to be a rather straightforward and undemanding task as you've outlined, at least as far as processor requirements are concerned.

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Thanks again. As I'm renting these laptops for the short time span of a week during which the workshop takes place, I guess my only option then would be to rent Macbooks, at least of those I know that they'll do the job. If my personal Macbook Pro dies, I'll be sure to give 3XS a thorough examination!

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