Frustrated with my new delta 44

[Bulls Hit]

OK, the same story as the guy with the 1010.

The disturbing thing about the distortion I'm getting is it's inconsistent. One take will sound terrible, I'll tweak some setting and the next take sounds fine. Great, problem solved until the next take and it sounds like shit again.

I thought I was maybe driving my system too hard recording 3 concurrent tracks, but this afternoon I was trying to record just one vocal track, and I couldn't get rid of the distortion. It's starting to really piss me off. I never had these issues with my crappy old Yamaha xg card. Plus I'm getting dropouts constantly.

My setup is
Athlon 1800+
640MB ram
40GB 7200rpm disk
WIN 98
Cakewalk GT Pro
Delta 44
Yamaha MG12/4 mixer

When I'm recording the meters on the mixer barely register. The M Audio levels are all within range, signal level set to +4db.
I've been through all the recommendations, defragged the drive, disabled everything else etc etc. Cakewalk & the M Audio control panel are the only apps running.
Any one else running a 44, could they tell me what their settings are?
Number DMA buffers
Sample rate
Signal levels

Also on the Cakewalk side, what's your setup - how many buffers, latency, I/O buffer size?

Let's hear any suggestions. I'm desperate, I'll try anything.

 

[A1A2]

I use sonar with Delta66. I'll start with Options>Audio

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General:

Playback/Record Timing Master: Delta66 1/2
Number of Aux:6
Number Mains:9
Audio Driver Bit depth:24
Sampling Rate: 96k File depth:24
Buffer in playback:2
Buffer size:26.7

Advanced:

I/O Buffer size:64

Input Monitoring

nothing, deselect all
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Delta's Driver: 5.10.00.0029

Lastly, does it happen to Sonar only? Have you tried testing on different programs? Does this happen to one project only or every project in Cakewalk?

let us know how it turns out for ya

Al

 

[Emeric]

"When I'm recording the meters on the mixer barely register. The M Audio levels are all within range, signal level set to +4db."

I'd suggest setting the soundcard to -10 and not +4 with your particular setup.

You may be overdriving your preamps on the mixer.

How do you have this all plugged together, are you using the inserts for sends to the sound card or are you using aux out's, main outs ..?

 

[vox]

Check all your cables.

Try sending a line level signal directly into the Delta from a CD player or keyboard etc. bypassing the mixer.

Try recording with no input into the Delta, getting noise?

Windows 98 needs some optimization for audio, I'm pasting a copy of an article that I found a couple years ago, not all the tweaks that this guy recommends are necessary for most people but it gives you a pretty extensive list of things you can try to fix the problem.

PC AUDIO OPTIMIZATION

I'm writing this account of the exact optimization steps I took that finally eliminated all crashes and glitches in PC recording Win98SE in case it's of use to others.

I checked out the many "audio optimization for PC" documents that exist around the Web and also asked around what other people were doing and then experimented with the various recommendations until the system became stable.

My current system (at December 2000) is a PIII 866Mhz with 512MB RAM and 115GB in two 7200 rpm ATA100 drives. My sound cards are the wonderful LynxOne and excellent Delta 66/Omni Studio combination from M Audio that has more than a dozen assorted ins and outs and is very flexible in its routing. .

Here's the things I did and the settings I now use that result in a very powerful rock-solid stable system:

0) Untangled Internet Exporer and other unecessary stuff from Windows by using Windows 98lite. This is one of the biggest things that resulted in a rock-solid and faster system.

00) Formatted my audio drive with /z:64 switch (Format d:/z:64 - makes larger clusters which read faster)

1) Virtual memory - min 1024, max 1024 (Control Panel/System/Performance/Virtual Memory)

2) Vcache - min 16384, max 16384 (in system.ini in Windows directory)

3) CD auto-insert notification disabled (Control Panel/System/Device Manager/CDROM/Properties/Settings)

4) Nothing in my startup folder (and used Start/Run/msconfig/startup to locate and remove other unnecessary items that were being loaded at startup - have to take care to know what they are). Of course, back up your registry before any of these changes!

5) All third-party memory management/crash protection/anti-virus tools disabled (*very* important!)

6) Defrag the hard drive regularly

7) Made sure read-ahead optimization was set at full (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Hard Disk) (note: for some people this works better at none)

8) Disabled write-behind caching (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Troubleshooting)

9) Ensured that double-buffering was turned off [in msdos.sys - hidden file in your root directory (there are shareware programs all over the net for editing it)]

10) Ensured that there was nothing unnecessary in autoexec.bat and config.sys (in root directory)

11) Ensured that my disks were set to the DMA option and that I was using bus-mastering drivers (Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Disk Drives/Properties/Settings)

12) Turned off Windows clock (not really necessary on a current fast system)

13) If you choose to let Windows manage virtual memory, include this line somewhere in AUTOEXEC.BAT:

DEL C:WIN386.SWP

So when your computer restarts it will rebuild the swap file unfragmented.

14) Make sure you have a stable version of DirectX (8.0 is not stable).

15) Disabled System Sounds (and screen savers!) (Control Panel/Sounds and Display)

16) Disabled Power Profiles [Control Panel/Power Management - you can also turn it off in msconfig (Start/Run/msconfig/startup)]

17) Put "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" in [386 Enh] section of system.ini

18) Set graphics to 16 bit 800 x 600 (actually I use 1024 x 768 but I included this info as it helps on some systems)

19) Enabled "Show Window Contents While Dragging" (Control Panel/Display/Effects)

20) Don't use any USB devices and disabled USB as Windows pings the USB bus every millisecond

21) Set computer type to Network Server (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Hard Disk)

22) Removed all modems, Network cards etc. (set on different hardware config - see below)

23) Turned graphics acceleration down a notch or two (Control Panel/System/Performance/Graphics - some say this is not good because it will make your CPU do more work). I had to turn mine down 2 notches because Vegas buttons got weird at higher settings.

24) Placed my virtual memory on my fastest disk drive using Release RAM Pro.

Another thing that can make a very big difference is to have nothing else at all on your computer other than your audio recording software. Windows lets you set up different hardware configs (Control Panel/System/Hardware Profiles) that you can choose between when you boot.

Also using a program like Memory+ or MemClean or FreeMem or MemTurbo to periodically free up RAM can help a lot (before but not during audio use). Release RAM Pro is a great one of these kinds of programs that also lets you make your virtual cache and virtual memory settings (including selecting which drive to put your cache on) from within itself and it also shows your CPU usage.


Hope this helps.

Tony Rockliff

Disclaimer!

I didn't write the above article and I haven't tried all the tips listed.




Of course your Delta might just be busted.

 

[Bulls Hit]

Thanks for those setting A1A2. I'll try them out when I get home tonight.

Emeric - I originally had them set to -10db. I changed to +4db, and that was one of the tweaks that 'worked', for about 2 takes before reverting to crap.

My understanding is that the Delta will try to boost a -10db signal, whereas it will leave a +4db one alone. Is this correct?

There's not much gain on the preamps, they're set at about 9 o'clock. The recorded audio waveform in cakewalk is well within bounds.

I'm using mains out xlr - 1/4" unbalanced for tracks 1 & 2, and group buss out 1/4" - 1/4" unbalanced for tracks 3 & 4. Could the unbalanced cables be causing the problem? The distortion only occurs when I'm actually singing into the mic - there's absolutely no noise during during the quiet passages.

Vox, thanks for those suggestions. I'll go through them tonight. And no there's no noise when I'm recording silence. I'll try bypassing the mixer tonight as well - that might help narrow it down

 

[Bulls Hit]

OK did a whole bunch of those tweaks as suggested by vox & A1A2, and it made no difference.

Also ran my keyboard straight into the 44 and got distortion, so the mixer is not at fault.

However I'm noticing a pattern here.
I open a project and can record the first set of tracks relatively problem-free.

Anyway from that point on, every take has distortion on it. So I close down Cakewalk, and start it up again. I can record another clean take, but only 1. The very next take, and all the rest have distortion again. It's almost like Cakewalk only has room for 1 clean take, and then fills up somehow.

There's something fundamentally sick with my setup. The old Yamaha card is still in its slot. Maybe that's causing issues?

 

[A1A2]

The old Yamaha card is still in its slot. Maybe that's causing issues?

It's a goood idea to check if there is any IRQ conflicts. I would pull out both cards, start machine, shut down, put delta back in, reinstall delta's driver and see if that helps.

Al