Sound cards and IRQ's

J

J Wah

New member
I installed a Delta 44 and am trying to get it up and running. I get alot of clicks and skips and was thinking maybe it was the IRQ (never had this prblem with old card). I took the card out and put it in a different PCI slot. It nows uses an IRQ that also says "ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering". Would that be a problem? Does your sound card have its own IRQ or share with others? I have some IRQ's that aren't being used. Can you specify what one a sound card should use?.

Anyone with a Delta card have any interferance with Video, hard drives or other stuff?
 
It's ideal to get the Delta on it's own IRQ. That's M-Audio's answer to every problem as unrelated as it may be. However, having the card on it's own IRQ is still preferable.

Try the following:

Disable ACPI and Power Management functions in your computer BIOS. Also, if your not using serial port 1 and 2, or your parallel port, disable those as well.

See what IRQ it ends up on, and if it is still sharing, with what? I've found PCI slot 2 and 4 to be the most likely slots to work best.

Mine doesn't share with anything else and it is on IRQ 10.

"Anyone with a Delta card have any interferance with Video, hard drives or other stuff?"

Is this a seperate question or do you still mean IRQ problems?
 
What OS are you using?

I believe there is always that "holder" thing in there so you can ignore that. You are going about it the right way. The sound card should have it's own IRQ and the easiest way that I know of is it to remove everthing but the video card then put in the sound card. Then add the other cards after that.

Make sure you reboot often after every step (card removal, adding them back in, etc.)
 
I am using Win 98.

I have dissabled the serial port, usb, and made available an IRQ that was reserved for legacy something (?).

If the "holder" thing is always there than do I actually have the card on its own? It is on 03 with the "holder".

I am trying to figure out what would be causing the skips in playback. How do I know if it is an IRQ problem.

Thanks
 
You know it's an IRQ problem because it goes away when you fix it :) hehe

First, however, what drivers are you using? Not the drivers that came with it I hope?

Slackmaster 2000
 
Are your hard drives running in DMA mode?

right click 'my computer'
select properties
device manager
disk drives
settings

Is the DMA checkbox checked?

This is a common cause of skips and pops as are the drivers/set tings in the Maudio control panel and a dozen other things.
 
I am using the drivers that came with the Delta 44 but I checked the m-aidio web site last night and they are latest drivers.

The DMA box is checked for both hard drives and the cdrw. Should all of these be unchecked?
 
Just made this suggestion in a different thread: if you are using PCI videocard, change it AGP. Some videocards "pollute" PCI bus, which results in pop and clicks out of the soundcard.
But before that try to increase the number and size of buffers for Delta and in your recording software.
 
This sucks. I don't have AGP. Buffers are big. Tried unchecking DMA. Whoooo, that didn't work. I'll see if the video driver is current.
 
"ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" is not problem or an error in itself. However I think Emeric is right in that it indicates that ACPI is enabled, and I find most things work better when it's not.
 
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