Problem: PHONIC PHHB18U (helix board firewire) ASIO with Cubase 5 + Win XP

[Monni]

Hi all and thanks for the great forum!

I have following problem: when using Phonic Helix Board mixer to record via Firewire into Cubase 5 with Win XP, the ASIO driver "dies" randomly. It just goes completely mute. This happens both when recording or playing back. And it seems to happen in "random". Few times per hour at least.

When using some other audio-interface (like Line6 toneport UX1) there is no problem. The way to 'fix' the situation is go into cubase device manager, change ASIO driver to "none", apply and then change back to Phonic ASIO 1394. Then things work again for some time.

I have not been able to narrow this problem down. For me it seems that when I have a lot of tracks (40 or more) in cubase, things start to fail. But I have not been able to figure out why. I can record full drum set (8 parallel tracks) without any problems, the latency is around 15ms.

The PC itself is very old; AMD XP3000 with 1.5 gigs of mem.

Any tips whot to start to debug this? It's driving our drummer and singer mad. And me too

 

[andybhoy]

I'm no expert, but have the same mixer helix 18, although i use a mac.

Take youve tried the obvious- download the latest drivers for the mixer, chipset updates for your motherboard (inc firewire). I downloaded the latest mixer drivers, even though it was working fine and found it was a bit more responsive. Occasionally when i started up cubase it said i had no connections so I had to set them all up again. With the new drivers this stopped.

Main thing i think though, is you could do with either a new computer or at the very least a memory upgrade. Im sure most would recommend at least 4gb and plenty space on your recording hard disk.

with this done you could try increasing the buffer size, it might increase the latency, but be less buggy.

 

[Chili]

I had the same problem when I switched to Win7, but I never had that problem when using WinXP. Turns out, Phonic doesn't support my model any longer and the drivers are not compatible with Win7. Most times when it happens, the mixer disappears from the Phonic Control Panel. Is that the case with you?

My fix was to stop using the Phonic and started using another interface with Win7 drivers.

Oh btw: 40 tracks might be tasking your computer too much. Like Andy said, you might want to consider upgrading the computer.

good luck