Modem question

[pdlstl]

Hi,

I'm new to this forum and pretty new to PC recording.

Brief rundown of gear:

HP 1.4 Ghz P4 (Willamette, 423, 400Mhz Bus, Tehama i850 chipset)
512 MB RDRAM (PC600)
60 GB internal hard drive(5400 rpm)
80 GB external firewire hard drive (7200 rpm Seagate, strictly for audio files)
Delta 44 card w/breakout box
SBLive card
Mackie 1202 VLZPro
T.C. Electronic Triple C compressor
Lexicon MPX100
Various plug-ins

CWPA9.02
CoolEdit2000

I record strictly acoustic instruments and vocals. No MIDI whatsoever.

With this set-up, I am experiencing random drop-outs. Sometimes while recording, sometimes during playback.

Someone posted on another forum that he improved his dropout problems dramatically by removing his modem. I am not using the installed modem at all as I use ADSL.

Would yanking my modem:

1.) Increase my performance?

2.) Not upset anything else in my system?

Also, any other tips for increasing performance and likewise decrease dropout issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Earl

 

[Emeric]

1. Increase Performance. Unlikely, unless it fixes your problem - then I guess we could call that a performance increase.
2. Possibly upset. Pulling out any card may rearrange the IRQ's.

But. I'd do it, pull the modem out.

Is your Delta sharing any IRQ's at the moment? Generally better to have is it's own.

Check in device manager, right click my computer, select properties, device manager, double click 'computer' - should be viewing by IRQ. Check this out before you pull the modem, if you decide to that is.

What operating system are you using?

 

[pdlstl]

Whoops. Sorry. Forgot to mention OS....WindowsME (ugh....!)

You hit the nail on the head when you said improve performance by decreasing problem. That's what I meant to ask.

I'm at work but will check the things you recommend as soon as I get home this evening.


Thanks,

Earl

 

[bnoji]

What PCI cards do you have installed? You might sometimes run into problems with audio dropouts if you have a card with a poorly written driver. Such is the case with some ATI video cards. What happens is, the FIFO buffer becomes full, so the card locks the PCI bus and sends a retry until the buffer has enough room to accept the new data. This is a cheap way for the manufacturer to get a little extra performance out of their card. As a side effect, your PCI sound card cannot use the bus and you get a period of dropped sound while it waits.

Depending on your setup this may or may not be a problem, but it's something I ran into a few months ago.

 

[TexRoadkill]

I would pull out the SB and see if that helps before messing with your modem.

 

[pdlstl]

TexRoadKill,

One question....do you know if the Delta card has the socket to plug in the audio wire from my DVD/CD-ROM and CDRW drives? This is the only reason I've left the SBLive card in.

BTW, are you from Texas? I'm in Fort Worth.


bnoji,

Thanks for additional info.

The info at the HP website indicates my computer shipped with a NVIDIA TNT2 PRO 3D AGP 4x video card.

Other than that, I have:

Delta 44 card

HP 10/100 BaseT LAN Adapter

V. 90 56K (Cheetah) modem

SBLive card

All PCI slots are full.

(BTW, I'm working from memory as computer in question is at home.)

Does this shed any light?

Thanks for everyone's thought and suggestions,

Earl

 

[Emeric]

Good point TexRoadkill, didn't even notice the SBLive! listing. I've heard others have problems getting soundcards to coexist, so you may want to pull that card out also.

There is no CD-Audio Connector on the Delta's, any of the newer mp3 players will play CD-Audio digitally without the need for the the audio cable. Winamp or Windows Media Player both do at least.

 

[WildFire]

Would yanking my modem:

1.) Increase my performance?

2.) Not upset anything else in my system?

Also, any other tips for increasing performance and likewise decrease dropout issues would be greatly appreciated.

Assuming you're modem is not a On-board modem, and is a "WinModem", I would say yes. There would be a slight increase in performace. Not a lot, probably around a +/- 4% increase.

Why? WinModems, unlike their older "hardware modem" counterpart, was designed with cost effectiveness in mind. In order to do that, they offloaded several hardware functions that required dedicated chips on to the computers CPU. This way they could remove the chips alltogether and just have the CPU coupled with the proper drivers do many of the modem functions.

The negative impact was it puts another load on system resources. Of course, computer systems were becoming much faster and could compensate for the new load. Thats why, if you noticed with a lot of winmodems, they had minimum system requirements non lower then a P1 200MMX. A hardware 56k modem on the otherhand could run on a 486 if need be.


Will removing it upset anything else? Unless you actually need to use it, No.

Future thinking in mind, had you ever needed to re-install the modem, sometimes (not often) will bring headaches.

My reccomondations... if it is a "Winmodem" (as most 56k modems are nowadays)... pull er out and never look back.



Best advice for performance?.... don't run anything in the background like VirusProtection, ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Screen Savers.. blah blah...

 

[RWhite]

Something else you may want to check - if you are using ADSL you probably have a network card in the system. Network cards, at least according to the Cakewalk people, can cause some performance problems. Rather than removing the network card (and loosing Internet connectivity) you might want to try makeing a second hardware configuration (done in Control Panel / system) in which your network card is disabled. So when you are recording, boot into that config and unplug the ADSL router. Then when you want to use the PC for general purpose, plug it back in and reboot into "Original configuration".

Now having said all that, I did all the above in response to a playback glitch I was getting (see the thread in the Cakewalk forum) and ultimately it made no difference in my case.