MOTU Traveler = Piece of S**t?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Henningsgard
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Steve Henningsgard

Steve Henningsgard

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A few months ago, I sold my Digi 002 (which is a certifiable piece of shit, primarily due to Digi's drivers) and bought a MOTU Traveler. At first, I liked this thing, but now that I've been using it in a studio environment, I get the feeling that it's an even bigger piece of shit than the 002 was, but I'd like some more opinions before selling this thing.

My primary issue is that, on random occasions, the unit will insert static related to the playback material, as though it were distorting. This happens regardless of any other factors that I can determine, including input volume, output volume, sample rate, etc. Turning the unit off/on helps for an indeterminate amount of time sometimes. Other times, it adds a crazy phase/panning thing to the playback (not like an effect or something, just a fucked-up playback).

Secondary issue is that any activity on the firewire bus will temporarily cut out playback and insert beeps and such. This is easily avoidable, but annoying none the less.

Anyone else have these issues? When the playback material is distorted/loud (rock/metal), it can be difficult to hear at first if the volume is up. I realize that MOTU's aren't exactly the best pieces of gear, but I was under the impression their issues were more in comparative fidelity to higher-end products (Apogee, Mytek, etc.) and customer service. This issue makes the unit unusable.
 
I had a Motu interface (actuallytwo) that were defective. I was upset and frustrated when the first one was defective and returned. Then I got another one. It was bad too. !!! Motu units have a good rep for the most part but the hours and hours of effort to make them work (which they did not) was not worth it. Bad luck on my part I guess. Happy RME user now. If you bought it from a good seller return the damned thing. BTW the Motu units from what I can tell are very picky about your firewire connection/card. Do you have a firewire PCI card? or is your system integrated?
 
I've had a Motu828mkII for 5 years with zero problems.

Thurgood is right - do you have the REQUIRED TexasInstruments or Lucent firewire chipset??
(If you're doing audio or video, its the only one you want....)
 
Steve Henningsgard said:
Secondary issue is that any activity on the firewire bus will temporarily cut out playback and insert beeps and such. This is easily avoidable, but annoying none the less.
Click to expand...

There's something very wrong if what you're describing is happening on a Mac. My guesses, in no particular order, are:

1. Bad FireWire cable.
2. Electrically flaky FireWire port on the laptop.
3. Defective PHY silicon on the MOTU.
4. Some really dodgy third-party driver or kernel extension.

Are you seeing anything in /var/log/kernel.log (run Console.app in /Applications/Utilities) that might indicate what's going on? For example, the last time I had trouble with a bad cable, I was getting lots of packet checksum/parity errors that were visible in that log.

I can't really think of any reason that traffic on the FireWire bus would interfere with an isoch audio stream at all, unless perhaps your hard drive isn't quite FireWire-spec-compliant and is causing bus resets or something wonky.

Oh, one other possibility, speaking of bus resets.... If your MacBook Pro is one that has the newer Lucent/Agere chipset, you might be running into a firmware bug that causes compatibility problems. Try flashing to the latest firmware on the MOTU and make sure you download the latest drivers from their website. (Once you're sure the thing is working, throw away whatever optical media came with the thing. Driver CDs exist only to cause suffering.)
 
Apologies: as an ex-IT guy, re-reading my post saddens me. What I had meant to say was that plugging in or unplugging a firewire device will cause said beeps, not actual activity. I will say that excess activity on the bus (file transfers of any magnitude) seem to be related to the primary static issue, although ceasing said activity doesn't stop it, and the sound itself doesn't seem to change depending on said activity.
 
Ah. This might be a case of the rather annoying "floating, noisy digital ground from an improperly damped power supply driving a bus-powered audio interface" problem. I didn't think any of the MacBook Pro supplies had those sorts of problems, but yours is old enough that it might have been from that first run, in which case you might try getting one of the newer power supply bricks and see if that cures it.

Does the problem go away when you run the thing without the power supply connected? Are you using the two-prong block or the three-prong extension cord plugged into that power supply?
 
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