Dropouts with UA-25 EX CW

These days I bought a UA-25 EX CW and now I am a little bit disappointed. Although I have a quite strong computer I experience annoying dropouts. I tried everything what the manual says, but it doesn't help.

I am confused:

- the dropouts do not depend on the setting of the buffer size; and
- they do not depend on the load; even playing a simple wav files produces drops.

I had neither dropouts with my onboard card and ASIO4ALL, nor did I have such problems with my USB speakers before.


Is there anything I can do? I could still return the interface ... but this would be really a pitty.

By the way: I use Vista 64.

Best regards and thank you for any help,
Martin

Oh, and does it produce dropouts or any other problems if you play back a song from Windows Media Player?

Tempo  Hi-Cup Problem:
[size=3 font="times new roman"] 
All of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky I have a tempo hic=cup problem.
 
Not only can I hear it, I can visually see it on the time code. It’s like the program pauses for a couple or three milliseconds every few beats. It does this in record and playback mode. I went on line and saw where other people have complained about the same thing. There has been tips and advise offered which I tried but to no avail.
One of the tips were: go in and change the number of ticks to a beat. Well. I tried that and it worked! Just to make sure, I layed down some fresh tracks and also loaded a midi file I got from the internet and it all worked just fine. Viola! Problem solved.   Not!     I went to work the next morning and it was back and no matter what I did I couldn’t solve the problem. another tip was to switch to ASIO driver mode. I did that. Didn't solve problem. I also tried un-installing and re-installing the UA-25 EX drivers. Didn't solve the problem. I'm thinking it has to do with the ext. UA-25 EX sound card. because when I use the internal (stock sigma-tel) card and play the same midi tracks using Windows Media Player I don't hear a wavering of tempo. Any advise?
 
Thank you in advance for any help.
Denster
Using: Yamaha Motif Rack ES, Roland JV80, UA-25 EX, Sonar LE, Gateway M350 laptop.
 

I'm not sure.  If you think you'll need extra USB slots for other devices then it's worth a shot.
 
Have you checked to see if you're running the latest BIOS?

Hi Martin

Have you tried using the DPC latency Checker? http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Your description of the problem implies that some other device driver on you PC may have a high DPC latency - specifically that the drop outs aren't dependent upon the amount of processing that is happening at the time and that they seem to happen over a regular period.

Download the tool and run it. There is lots of info on thesyscon site, here on the forums (search all of them) and other music technology sites and I won't go into the full details of what is happening here but basically, if you are getting a high DPC latency showing up in the checker then the driver for some other piece of hardware on you PC is not correctly implemented for low deferred procedure call latencies (note that this is nothing to do with audio latency).

If you do get spikes in the checker tool then you can start disabling devices one by one to find out which is causing the problem or you can do a crash course in hardware driver design and debugging hardware problems using tools such as those provided by Microsoft via Sysinternals http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

BTW you would almost certainly get the same problem with any other USB interface by any manufacturer.

Hope this helps

Phil