Delta66/Sonar Woes - Please Help

M

mayan

New member
Here's the situation: PentIII850E/Win2k/DFI CA(something) Mobo with VIA chipset, Delta 66 and Sonar. I'm running 3 hard-drives on an Ultra controller card. The Sonar is on a dedicated IBM Deskstar. Totally unfragmented.

After watching my hair turn white over the last week while getting all of this installed, I seem to be down to one last -MAJOR - issue. When I do an audio recording from my synth, I get a -somewhat-rythmic popping/static sound. Almost sounds like a phono stylus at the end of a record (remember those?). When I record silence, I don't hear the static - it just seems to come when music is being played. This would be alright if I was John Cage but I'm not. I note that the sound seems to go away when I enable read/write caching in Sonar but then CPU performance goes way up and dropouts rule the day. I also note that there are no glitches when I play already recorded .wav files like Acid loops. DMA seems to be enabled on the harddrives.

I have tried every parameter in Sonar that I can see. I have installed and reinstalled the WDM drivers in Delta. I pulled my SBLive. Got rid of the ACPI. Lowered the hardware acceleration of my graphics card. Installed the 4in1 VIA drivers - I think. All to no avail. Any other suggestions? It's driving me beserk and reducing me to a gabbling idiot. (I think the Mobo may have on-board sound and "legacy" audio drivers. I've tried to disable it but I'm not sure if I was successful.)

TIA
Steven
 
couple things

I could never solve a similar problem I was having with a Via board.
maybe load more memory? what kind of a controller? is it an ata100 controller? how many ide devices do you have now? could you be having conflicts?

I don't have an answer, just more questions to think about.
H2H
 
You might also try playing with the buffer settings in the Delta Control Panel. I'm not at my DAW at the present time, but if you call up the Delta Control panel, I think one of the tabs is labeled Hardware Settings. On that are two items that control your latency settings (buffers and something else if I recall). Try raising them a bit to see if it helps. You probably will need to reprofile your soundcard in Sonar after you make the change.

The other thing to try, if the first doesn't help, is to disable your USB and see if that does anything.
 
Thanks for the replies. I've tried disabling the USB ports. Nope. No change. I've been told -by midiman tech support that they will be coming out with a new Win2000 driver in a coupla weeks. Of course, I can't count on that - and I can't rely upon it helping. I'm thinking though that I may be dump the Mobo - its still in the 30 day return period. Do Delta 66's do alright with i815 chipset? Any suggestions of Mobo. I currently have an Pentium III 850e. I'm at wit's end and the VIA chipset is my scapegoat.

Hard2Hear: Did you keep the VIA chipset. How did you resolve your problems? Or did you switch cards? Thanks.
 
mayan-
I dumped multiple Via boards I went through and got an 815 chipset board. Not a single problem since.

H2H
 
Thanks, H2H...

Which mobo did you end up with? This sounds like the route I'm gonna go with.

S.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top