Firestudio sounds incredible, but my laptop gets horrible dropouts when monitoring

[JuicyDbase]

I finally got around to selecting a firewire interface and purchased a firestudio among other things that burnt a hole in my pocket. Got it about 8 days later and set it up. I did a scratch recording to test it out and without touching the audio in anyway at all it sounded just fantastic. It has good clear representation. BUT! when I went to playback and was monitoring my DAW from the firestudio headphone or any other jack, it has extremely annoying and frequet dropouts. I have tried messing around with all the different buffer settings. After tweaking that it went to about ever 5 seconds or so. I have no clue what to do here. I installed the firestudio drivers and cubase on another desktop that has about 1.53 ghz and only 512mb ram and that runs with absolutely no problems even when on the highest buffer settings.

I've tried pushing the button on the laptop for turning off wireless capability, I have tried disabeling the windows firewall. I also had the thought that it is droping out on the laptop because it's using a 6pin to 4 pin firewire cable, could this type of cable cause dropouts? I can't test the different cables out on the laptop because it only has the 4 pin which is increadibly stupd because a normal 6 pin firewire jack does not take much room. Also I read up on how SP2 slows down the firewire ports, and so I downloaded a fix for it from microsoft but it would not even install (good one mr. gates). I have been looking all over trying to fix the interacton between the firestudio and the laptop for about 4 hours every day for the past 5 days with no luck....ha.

I am completely stumped. So..., if anybody has any ideas send a reply this way.

- Here's what I am running it on.

1.8ghz intel duo HP Pavilion dv8000 laptop
Windows XP media center
1 internal 80gb hard drive, free space= 4 gb (drivers and cubase used to be on this drive)
1 internal 93gb hard drive, free space= 74gb (moved the drivers and cubase to this drive but it did not change anything)
I am not sure about the ram, pretty sure it has 2gb. In the device manager it has a primary ide and then lists two 1gb controllers.
Some gorilla giant nvidia graphics card (don't know if that would be slowing it down.)

--
"If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut."
-- by Albert Einstein

[shortness]

hello JuicyDbase-do you have anything else attached to your laptop (ie external harddrive/cd burner/etc)?...not sure if it is the same 'drop outs' that you are speaking of, but when i have my external hd/cd burner attached (via usb) i get a lot of sputtering and popping going on when playing back/monitoring thru my firepod...if i unhook all is well...

[JuicyDbase]

No, no drive connected to it yet. The only thing would be another monitor connected to the auxilary video out, but even when it is not set for an expanded monitor it does it.

[JuicyDbase]

Anyone have issues similar to this?

[TimOBrien]

6pin-to-4pin cable - not your problem. The other 2 pins only provide electrical power to external devices and do not interact with the signals in any way.
I use a 4-to-6 cable with my Motu828mkII with zero problems.

Most likely the dropouts are due to a slow internal harddrive.

Get an external fast (7200rpm) firewire hard drive and try it. Bet your dropouts will go away...

Also, XP Media Center is known to have severe issues with recording software and hardware. Check around the web for the reports. You'd probably be better off with standard XP.

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I use a Gateway P4 XP laptop with a Motu828mkII, Glyph firewire drive for recording projects, Seagate USB2/Firewire drive for video editing, MidisportUSB2x2 midi interface plus external gear and all the major software packages. ZERO problems.

[jabulani jonny]

Juicy, the only time I've ever had dropouts with my Firestudio was when I had some funky driver for my wireless card and wireless was on. Other than that I would double check your IRQ settings for your firewire port to make sure that it's not sharing an IRQ with another piece of hardware. Make sure all of your hardware drivers are up to date and make sure you download the latest Firestudio driver from the Presonus site.

Then stand on your head put your finger in your ear and hit the power button. That should work.

OH yeah, and double check who the manufacturer is of your firewire card. You want it to be Texas Instruments. Another thing you can try if it's the firewire port is to pick up a PCMCIA / Firewire adapter and use that. I have one and use it sometimes when I have other FW devices to hook up. That would be one way to double check to see if it's the port, or IRQ conflict or some other software setting. Make sure you get one with the Texas Instruments chipset. Others have known compatibility issues....like dropouts.

[Carter]

Originally Posted by TimOBrien

Also, XP Media Center is known to have severe issues with recording software and hardware. Check around the web for the reports. You'd probably be better off with standard XP.

I kinda disagree, Im running a compaq presario with an athlon 64 2.2 Ghz, XPMCE, a Firestudio and a Digimax FS with cubase SX3 and I have no problems what so ever!

[zperlow]

I'm having the same exact problems. I have a Firestudio and a Digimax FS. My laptop is an Asus s96s with a 2.2ghz centrino, 7,200 speed 120gb hard drive, 3gb mem, XP w/spk 2. I've done all of the same things to try and fix the dropouts, with no luck. However, they work fine one my friend's 2.2ghz dual core amd desktop. I've almost given up on trying to fix it.

[JuliánFernández]

You should test it with a PCI Firewire card with a TexasInstruments chipset...
It seems to work better than other chipsets...

HTH.

[Hard2Hear]

There are issues with the TC Electronic DiceII Firewire chip, which is used in the Firestudio among other units out there. I didn't see what software you were using. There are known specific issues with different software, as well as compatability issues with different Firewire cards. If it happens to be Sonar, you're just hosed and its not going to work. If its not, getting a TI Firewire card may or may not help your issue.

Carter seems to be the one person on earth with all the wrong stuff that happens to work perfectly. Even things I've talked with about directly with Presonus he doesn't seem to have.

[zperlow]

Yeah, my laptop only has an express card slot. I bought a startech firewire card, which I think showed up as a texas inst. I didn't even try to do any audio playback with it because the Firestudio will not stay in sync.

*I use Cubase SX3*

[Will_R]

Does your laptop have a built in sound card?

When i was having problems with my firepod, i added a hardware profile with everything i didnt NEED for recording, turned off.

One of the big problems my computer seemed to have was when using my creative live soundcard and firepod at the same time (though i was told these would not conflict, they clearly did). I also had onboard sound, but that has long since been disabled.

Disable wireless + other sound cards.

Might help

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Hard2Hear

There are issues with the TC Electronic DiceII Firewire chip, which is used in the Firestudio among other units out there. I didn't see what software you were using. There are known specific issues with different software, as well as compatability issues with different Firewire cards. If it happens to be Sonar, you're just hosed and its not going to work. If its not, getting a TI Firewire card may or may not help your issue.

The hardware I know of that uses the Dice II chipset is as follows:

Presonus FireStudio
Alesis IO/26
TC Konnekt

I make no guarantees that there aren't others, of course. It isn't a particularly popular chipset, and from what you say, apparently for good reason.

The device chipset shouldn't determine compatibility with a particular application, though. The device chipset doesn't interact with an application. If there's a compatibility problem with Dice II devices and Sonar, it's a bug in the driver or in the HAL layer (ASIO or WDM in the case of Windows, CoreAudio HAL on the Mac), not in the chipset. That said, an awful lot of hardware manufacturers (though not necessarily in the audio space) ship slightly tweaked versions of some stock driver from some chipset vendor (with emphasis on describing such companies as an awful lot), so it really wouldn't surprise me at all if they all had the same bug....

*sigh*

[zperlow]

Will R, I already tried disabling all of my networks except for the firewire and I turned off my firewall...no luck. However, I did not try disabling the soundcard. Did that fix your problem with your laptop? Thanks for the tip.

[Will_R]

Its a desktop PC im using.

I realise you have already disabled it, i was just meaning that the way i got around it was by disabling everything i didnt need. The items that had the worst effect on my firepod were the wireless and other soundcard.

So maybe disabling your other soundcard might work