M-Audio audio card owners: No joy for SATA audio

All Righty Then...

I made my request to M-Audio

I get this Vertigous, Queasy Feeling...

That There's No One Around

And my Feet are left Dangling

Off The Ground


(see, that's not a bump, 'cause I wrote something meaningful)

Man. I'm planning on putting a system together in the next couple of weeks; some of the key components I was planning on using were SATA drives and an M-Audio 1010lt. Any idea if this problem includes all of their hardware or just some specific pieces?

I united this morning and sent midiman my complaint. I won't hold my breath though.

Excellent, Z, keep up the effort, and hopefully this little wrinkle will get ironed out... to the benefit of (who really knows how many?) M-Audio/SiI SATA users.

ORIGINAL: Zlartibartfast
...and (kudos) PCI Latency of the SATA controller.

I'm truly impressed. Gives me a sort of warm and fuzzy feeling all over.

...I no longer have SATA active in the system. ... I have had no further response. ... could give them an out.

You're absolutely right. Especially at lowest level of TS. BTW, by "Level One", did you mean the lowest or the highest level of TS?

Maybe you should try to reproduce the problem in some innocuous way? Like temporarily put the SATA drive back in? Otherwise, their TS will have no way of confirming that the issue has been resolved on your end so that they can close the ticket.

ORIGINAL: HammerHead
i went back to ide to solve my issues.
sata(sil) + maudio = crackling audio (at least for me)

You're not the only coward. Seriously, you're not alone in this quandary.

i dont have time to file a case with m-audio. not interested
in ripping things back apart and creating more issues.
everything is stable now so as they say....if it aint broke
dont fix it. ... at least i have a ton of storage now.

Yes, stability is a good thing. But this is a "cause" thread, and you're not really helping the cause here! So, HH, by "a ton of storage", do you mean that you still have your SATA drive installed in your M-Audio DAW? If it isn't, it really wouldn't be "breaking" much of anything to stick it back in and point an audio project to it. On my DAW I go back and forth between IDE and SATA audio drives all the time, no problem.

At this stage of the game, every voice counts. Heck, I might even be willing to join the fray if somebody had a spare M-Audio card for me to try. That would be a big disruption for me though, because it would upset my audio configuration as well as my internal DAW setup. (A ghost would definitely be in order on that one, at the very least.) That's why I'm hoping more M-Audio card owners can jump in here and just reactivate their SATA audio, so maybe M-Audio can finally lick this problem for good. (And maybe, as they can work with SiI, they can together learn to do SATA audio better in general, which would help a lot more people.)

You're absolutely right. Especially at lowest level of TS. BTW, by "Level One", did you mean the lowest or the highest level of TS?

Maybe you should try to reproduce the problem in some innocuous way? Like temporarily put the SATA drive back in? Otherwise, their TS will have no way of confirming that the issue has been resolved on your end so that they can close the ticket.

Yeah, Carlos, I mean first level. I'm used to 3 tier support - L1 being intial customer contact, L2 being the L1's contact (and intermediary to engineering), and L3 being the validators and instructors for L2 & L1. Years ago I had a direct contact with L3 at MidiMan; today I don't know anybody.

I really can't put my SATA drives back in - they went into my server when I stole it's RAID 5. Now if I could afford to buy a new SATA disk, then I have free slots and cables in the case, so I wouldn't have to pull the SCSI out again, but I'm so strapped for cash....

I will continue to engage M-Audio and try as hard as I can to keep the ticket open.

I received a reply from a different tech at M-Audio, I do not know what position this tech holds in relation to the first contact, but the message was (essewntially) that the Delta/SiL SATA issue will be reviewed by engineers for consideration in the next driver release.

I replied that I will be able to work further with the company, and once I have my current project finished I could even restore the config that gave me trouble in the first place.

I also offerd to gather information from other Delta/SiL users that had similar problems.

So far, they are demonstrating their support to be of the highest quality, and I find this to be very encouraging.

To those who have had the same problems as I: SPEAK UP!!!

Yep I got a reply. I got the same "canned" reply...check BIOS, SIS drivers, IRQ's etc. I replied back to them as to I have the latest BIOS and drivers etc. No more communications as of this morning.

If anyone wants to know their PCI latencies, check out http://mark-knutson.com/t3/ and download the little program DoubleDawg. There is some interesting reading there about pops and clicks and such, and that utility lets you change the PCI latencies of individual cards seperately, so maybe you'll find a solution to this SATA issue.... If not, at least you'll know your latency values.

Good luck,

Neil.

ORIGINAL: Thomas Campitelli
Zlartibartfast, I was bitten by this problem when building a DAW for my brother. After reading losguy's awesome thread about reclaiming SATA for audio, I tried all the latency tweaks. Those did not work, unfortunately. I then replaced his SATA audio drive with IDE. I still had a few problems with crackling (this was on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe board that had a particularly crowded PCI bus). There was no way to disable the chip in the BIOS either. When replacing all the SATA drives with IDE did not provide the hoped for relief, I performed open heart surgery. I pulled the machine apart, swapped the ASUS mobo and AMD proc with an Intel board and chip. Ouch! No crackling now.

Wow TC, sounds like this was an extreme case. Sorry to see you had to go to such great lengths. Ouch indeed. Was this also a case of an M-Audio card by chance?

I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe on my personal DAW. Same SiL SATA chip, but I have a Firewire 410 interface. While I don't have crackling, typing on the keyboard causes gaps in the audio. That happens with all audio: CD, MP3, and Sonar. So, I don't type while I am recording. :) Now I am deeply suspicious of external SATA chips. Almost all the high end AMD boards (even the Nforce3 models that natively support SATA) include the vile little things.

Well, thanks for this interesting little tidbit. Your Firewire interface performance may be helping to answer something I'd been wondering about: if taking the audio off the PCI slot bus helps SATA audio with SiI interfaces the same way that taking SATA off the PCI slot bus helps with PCI audio cards. Tell me: Are you currently using SATA audio with this setup on your A7N8X Deluxe, like me?

The glitch-while-you-type phenomenon is also quite intriguing. Suggests some sort of uncooperative behavior with the keyboard interrupt and/or driver. Tell me: How are you connecting your FW410... to the FW interface onboard the A7N8X, or to a PCI slot card? The IRQs aren't somehow conflicting, are they?

TIA for the info (oh, and BTW thanks for the compliment back there too).

ORIGINAL: Thomas Campitelli
Indeed. I forgot to mention that. My brother's DAW uses a Delta 66.

Well then, congratulations, you are totally on-topic here. Yet another case of M-Audio and SiI. Wish we could've gotten an msinfo32 dump for the old config. Oh well.

... I have an 80 GB WD IDE for my OS and programs. My audio drive is a 120 GB WD SATA model. ... I orginally used the onboard IEEE 1394 hookups on the board. However, I noticed that it did not use an M-Audio approved chipset, so I switched to a PCI card sporting a Via Chipset that M-Audio smiled upon. I thought this might help, but I still have the same problem

So, apart from typing on the keyboard, you didn't actually experience audio glitches with either Firewire plug?

Re: IRQs. My old firewire controller shared an IRQ with a USB host and an nForce audio controller.

Yeah, same here, except I've disabled the nForce onboard audio.

My new Firewire PCI card has its own IRQ, as does my Sil chip. My keyboard and mouse also have their own IRQs. I do not notice any audio skipping when I use the onboard sound card. Kinda frustrating that the cheaper card is more consistent.

So, it's a tradeoff between 1) Firewire that's off the PCI slot bus but that shares and IRQ with USB/etc. and 2) Firewire on its own IRQ but that sits on the PCI slot bus. Either way, that's a weird problem with the keyboard. Is it some sort of "special" keyboard? I suppose you tried different keyboard drivers, like maybe even the basic Windows one?

Losguy, you do good work, man. Your posts have been of great help to me as I wade my way through the DAW seas. Thank you for your efforts. I sincerely appreciate them.

Thanks!

ORIGINAL: losguy
Well then, congratulations, you are totally on-topic here. Yet another case of M-Audio and SiI. Wish we could've gotten an msinfo32 dump for the old config. Oh well.

Yeah, that would have been useful. There were no IRQ conflicts, but there's a bunch of other stuff that msinfo32 does. I may have sent the cats at M-Audio said file. However, I think that email exchange resides on a computer 180 miles away from me, if it exists at all.

So, apart from typing on the keyboard, you didn't actually experience audio glitches with either Firewire plug?

None so far. However, I am still using Sonar 1.3.1 with MME drivers. I downloaded the Sonar 3 demo a ways back and WDM worked quite nicely. I am looking forward to getting a more recent version of Sonar. Cakewalk will probably be on v5 by the time I am ready to buy.

So, it's a tradeoff between 1) Firewire that's off the PCI slot bus but that shares and IRQ with USB/etc. and 2) Firewire on its own IRQ but that sits on the PCI slot bus. Either way, that's a weird problem with the keyboard. Is it some sort of "special" keyboard? I suppose you tried different keyboard drivers, like maybe even the basic Windows one?

No, it's a pretty standard keyboard. It's a Microsoft Internet model. I did not install any special drivers. XP recognized it during the install and worked its mojo. My brother's machine using the very similar ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe had the same problem. He had a Microsoft Natural series keyboard. I am pretty sure the problem lies with the ASUS PCI bus on the Deluxe models. It is quite overcrowded.

ORIGINAL: Thomas Campitelli

So, apart from typing on the keyboard, you didn't actually experience audio glitches with either Firewire plug?

None so far. However, I am still using Sonar 1.3.1 with MME drivers. I downloaded the Sonar 3 demo a ways back and WDM worked quite nicely. I am looking forward to getting a more recent version of Sonar. Cakewalk will probably be on v5 by the time I am ready to buy.

That's the way the ball bounces. But hey, by then, you'll get even better technology. What a deal. Still, that's good info about the Firewire. Even the onboard Firewire is relatively glitch-free. That's excellent! And, it shows one way that an M-Audio interface can work with the SiI SATA!

What's this about MME drivers? You can't get WDM working with the FW410? Or am I missing something about SONAR 1.3.1?

I am pretty sure the problem lies with the ASUS PCI bus on the Deluxe models. It is quite overcrowded.

Well, FWIW, my Zippy keyboard doesn't cause glitches. But my system is configured the other way around, with onboard SATA and a PCI audio card with WDM drivers. BTW, you could un-crowd your PCI slot bus by one slot if you pulled the PCI FW card and went back to the onboard FW port. (I know it doesn't help the keyboard issue, but since you mentioned crowding...)

ORIGINAL: Zlartibartfast
Yes they do know, and we're up at bat again. I made a base hit and got two different techs on my ticket. One of them SEEMS to be at level 2. Therefore, I will continue on my Sisyphusian task

Zlart, don't despair, this is a good thing you're doing. Good luck with the rock hauling (sorry, I had to go and look up Sisyphus and then remembered that he was 'that rolling rock guy').

BTW my PS/2 mouse creates audible noise when I move it; I don't have it plugged in when I'm recording, to avoid contaminating a take

Is that electrical noise, mechanical noise, or a tiny 'squeak squeak'? If it's electrical, it's probably a ground loop.