Poor Sound Quality with Saffire PRO & Lenovo Thinkpad W510

[splendor]

I am pretty new to home recording. Anyway here is my problem.

The audio I am getting using a Saffire PRO 40 sounds very bad. There is what you might describe as kind of a hollow and shallow sound. There are also occasional skips/blips. Using the same microphone, in the same room, but instead connected to the internal sound for my desktop (minitower), I have not noticed these problems.

recording made using Laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad W510) and Saffire Pro 40:
View attachment Do Re Mi laptop.mp3

recording made using Dell Demension E510 internal sound (SigmaTel Audio):
View attachment Do Re Mi desktop.mp3

There is a blip around :02 in the first recording.

Both recordings were made using Audacity 1.3. Settings were 32-bit float, mono, 44100 Hz.

For the laptop, audacity device toolbar settings were MME, Microphone (Safffire Audio), and 1 (Mono) Input Channel.

I very much would appreciate any help. Let me know if you need any more information.

 

[Scorge]

I don't have much time but...

I have a Saffire Focusrite Pro 40, I had a faulty firewire cable and experienced dropouts and connection difficulties, as soon as I swapped out the firewire cable with a different one the unit worked like a charm. The pro 40's are notorious for shipping with faulty firewire cables. If I were you I would try replacing the firewire cable, and trying different XLR's.
The best thing to do is eliminate all the obvious problems, if the problem persists it might be a bad unit

Goodluck!

 

[jaygee]

Does Audacity support ASIO device drivers ?
I would try to use the ASIO driver that came with your Saffire instead of the default MME driver.

It could also be a process running on your laptop that is causing the glitches.

Wireless processes are notorious for causing glitches to audio system software.
As an experiment, you can disable your wireless adapter on your laptop and see if the glitches go away.

 

[splendor]

Thank you for the replies. I disabled the wireless, and now recordings seem to sound better. I wonder why this problem happens.

 

[ruthers1959]

I can't speak for Windows 7, but historically recording on Windows has been very sensitive to timing issues. The Vista upgrade was problematic for me, a change of hardware did the same. I'm a Mac user these days. My Macbook pro handles that interface fine.