Hmmm....

Certainly - I wouldn't want to confuse anyone here, but I don't think I'd be too harsh on the SB if it's an XFi series PCI unit made in the last few years. Some of these units have specs which actually outdo some well known 'pro' brands. I'd quibble with an XFi's mic/line input, no doubt, (although digital in would be fine) but its output is way more than suitable for driving a set of monitors. I've used them in the past (I had an XFi Extreme Music) for a time and their ASIO interfaces worked fantastically (plus they had no-cost DSP based effects you could drop on a monitor/headphone mix - it's based on E-MU technology after all). Creative also endeavored to update it's drivers to Vista and Win 7 as well. For myself,  I'd put a more confidence in their ability to produce well-written Windows ASIO drivers than a company that considers a PC internal interface product a niche item.

I would agree with a PCIe recommendation for new equipment, but I don't really see that using an existing PCI interface, at this moment, as much of an issue for audio data. Within reason, there is just no way anyone is going to 'overload' an PCI interface with audio data, nor is the the bridging from PCIe to PCI going to have any real impact.

What's key are two things; the quality of the interface drivers, and the quality of a DAW's internal scheduler for mixing and and effect processing. Unfortunately, we're limited to subjective observations here - we have no proof other than what we see/hear.

Personally, I'm not crazy about Realtek. They could easily have better specs. In a perfect world, motherboard based sound chips would be ideal for monitoring. But we're not, and we as music and sound oriented folk have greater needs.

titetrax


Thanks for your help but I can't afford to buy ANYTHING right now which is why I came to the forum for advice on how to FIX the problem. I can't be the only person experiencing audio dropouts from the Realtek driver so I thought someone here would have a fix(remove the XXXX driver file, uncheck the xxxx button, etc.). I guess I'll try the ASUS forum since my motherboard is from them. Try to remember in the future that BUYING a new this or that, has probably ALREADY occurred to a person seeking help and OBVIOUSLY wasn't an option. 

Wow-very classy reply-These folks were only trying to help you. Please READ yor title-You asked if a sound card would help. So if you knew you couldn;'t buy one, why then did you ask. So chill out man

stratman70

titetrax


Thanks for your help but I can't afford to buy ANYTHING right now which is why I came to the forum for advice on how to FIX the problem. I can't be the only person experiencing audio dropouts from the Realtek driver so I thought someone here would have a fix(remove the XXXX driver file, uncheck the xxxx button, etc.). I guess I'll try the ASUS forum since my motherboard is from them. Try to remember in the future that BUYING a new this or that, has probably ALREADY occurred to a person seeking help and OBVIOUSLY wasn't an option. 

Wow-very classy reply-These folks were only trying to help you. Please READ yor title-You asked if a sound card would help. So if you knew you couldn;'t buy one, why then did you ask. So chill out man

Have you bothered to read this entire thread before posting?

I tried getting my internal Realtek chip to work whilst waiting delivery of my interface (just for laughs), from my experience sorry you are never going to get this to work (yes I tried everything as well :).
I'm shocked people even got close.
Get any hardware that supports ASIO drivers/your operating system off ebay and save yourself a heap if you are on a budget.

SuperG


Hmmm....

Certainly - I wouldn't want to confuse anyone here, but I don't think I'd be too harsh on the SB if it's an XFi series PCI unit made in the last few years. Some of these units have specs which actually outdo some well known 'pro' brands. I'd quibble with an XFi's mic/line input, no doubt, (although digital in would be fine) but its output is way more than suitable for driving a set of monitors. I've used them in the past (I had an XFi Extreme Music) for a time and their ASIO interfaces worked fantastically (plus they had no-cost DSP based effects you could drop on a monitor/headphone mix - it's based on E-MU technology after all). Creative also endeavored to update it's drivers to Vista and Win 7 as well. For myself,  I'd put a more confidence in their ability to produce well-written Windows ASIO drivers than a company that considers a PC internal interface product a niche item.

I would agree with a PCIe recommendation for new equipment, but I don't really see that using an existing PCI interface, at this moment, as much of an issue for audio data. Within reason, there is just no way anyone is going to 'overload' an PCI interface with audio data, nor is the the bridging from PCIe to PCI going to have any real impact.

What's key are two things; the quality of the interface drivers, and the quality of a DAW's internal scheduler for mixing and and effect processing. Unfortunately, we're limited to subjective observations here - we have no proof other than what we see/hear.

Personally, I'm not crazy about Realtek. They could easily have better specs. In a perfect world, motherboard based sound chips would be ideal for monitoring. But we're not, and we as music and sound oriented folk have greater needs.

It's not a case of which of the choices available are 'better' it's about which one is most likely to work.
 
PCI on a bridged PCI board is a crap shoot at best regardless of whether it is an RME unit or the latest SB one.  PCIe is another matter if it IS a PCIe card then I'd be suggesting trying that first.
 
Lets not confuse the idea that one will be better than the other based on capabilities or what you may have read about one over the other here.  Neither are ideal as the OP is already aware but in the interim he'd like to get something going. regardless of 'brand'. 
 
I know for certain from experience and from the amount of mobile users here that you can get HD Audio working adequately with Sonar, thusly equipped along with a pair of cheap cans, as I was myself at one point, I won a couple of minor mix competitions against some much better equipped entrants.
 
Its not ideal because of the high latency when monitoring and lack of external IO options but trust me it at least should work.
 
 
It may end up that neither choice is a goer, but I've personally been in a position where an extra can of beans isn't an option let alone a hundred bucks for a cheap interface, hopefully the OP isn't in that situation but that's been the reality for some of us at certain points.
 
 

CakeAlexS


I tried getting my internal Realtek chip to work whilst waiting delivery of my interface (just for laughs), from my experience sorry you are never going to get this to work (yes I tried everything as well :).
I'm shocked people even got close.
Get any hardware that supports ASIO drivers/your operating system off ebay and save yourself a heap if you are on a budget.

...and that isn't PCI on if you are using a motherboard with bridged PCI, most common configuration for PCI on more recent/newer boards.  Else it might work or it might not and you wont get a cent back on used gear.
 
Heck I've got an E-Mu 0404 I could mail the guy for Xmas if I thought it would help him rather than give him a bigger headache, for real.  If he wants it he can have it, for the price of a PM with his mailing address direct from the UK.  But I bet there's someone here with a bit of unwanted gear that would work better.  
  
C'mon guys it's Christmas lets make something good happen rather than give the guy a hard time.
 
I'm able to do that much and I'll tell ya' for absolute real it would be nothing compared to the support I've had from this board and its members the few years I've been here.
 
 

Jonbouy

SuperG


Hmmm....

Certainly - I wouldn't want to confuse anyone here, but I don't think I'd be too harsh on the SB if it's an XFi series PCI unit made in the last few years. Some of these units have specs which actually outdo some well known 'pro' brands. I'd quibble with an XFi's mic/line input, no doubt, (although digital in would be fine) but its output is way more than suitable for driving a set of monitors. I've used them in the past (I had an XFi Extreme Music) for a time and their ASIO interfaces worked fantastically (plus they had no-cost DSP based effects you could drop on a monitor/headphone mix - it's based on E-MU technology after all). Creative also endeavored to update it's drivers to Vista and Win 7 as well. For myself,  I'd put a more confidence in their ability to produce well-written Windows ASIO drivers than a company that considers a PC internal interface product a niche item.

I would agree with a PCIe recommendation for new equipment, but I don't really see that using an existing PCI interface, at this moment, as much of an issue for audio data. Within reason, there is just no way anyone is going to 'overload' an PCI interface with audio data, nor is the the bridging from PCIe to PCI going to have any real impact.

What's key are two things; the quality of the interface drivers, and the quality of a DAW's internal scheduler for mixing and and effect processing. Unfortunately, we're limited to subjective observations here - we have no proof other than what we see/hear.

Personally, I'm not crazy about Realtek. They could easily have better specs. In a perfect world, motherboard based sound chips would be ideal for monitoring. But we're not, and we as music and sound oriented folk have greater needs.

It's not a case of which of the choices available are 'better' it's about which one is most likely to work.
 
PCI on a bridged PCI board is a crap shoot at best regardless of whether it is an RME unit or the latest SB one.  PCIe is another matter if it IS a PCIe card then I'd be suggesting trying that first.
 
Lets not confuse the idea that one will be better than the other based on capabilities or what you may have read about one over the other here.  Neither are ideal as the OP is already aware but in the interim he'd like to get something going. regardless of 'brand'. 
 
I know for certain from experience and from the amount of mobile users here that you can get HD Audio working adequately with Sonar, thusly equipped along with a pair of cheap cans, as I was myself at one point, I won a couple of minor mix competitions against some much better equipped entrants.
 
Its not ideal because of the high latency when monitoring and lack of external IO options but trust me it at least should work.
 
 
It may end up that neither choice is a goer, but I've personally been in a position where an extra can of beans isn't an option let alone a hundred bucks for a cheap interface, hopefully the OP isn't in that situation but that's been the reality for some of us at certain points.
 
 

I've never had any issues, but...


A quick look on the inter-tubes shows that this issue occurs on ASUS/SandyBridge designs... and unfortunately there's been a whole lot of buzz on 'SandyBridge'; some folks might be tempted to buy something simply because it says 'SandyBridge'.... Myself, I have a two year old AMD quad, and it smokes as far as Sonar goes.

I agree, it's a crap shoot if you don't have any knowledge of your motherboard. But I'd bet a wooden nickel this problem goes away with newer boards or different vendors, this looks to be an support chipset screwup, specifically spurious interrupts. The Linux kernel folks seem to have further details on the issue. Certainly not ASUS or Intel's first hose-up. Bridging shouldn't normally be an issue for PCI, it's been designed to support that from the beginning - it's just there's was little need for multiple standard PCI buses, and few if any motherboards were designed that way. However, PCIe is actually designed such each slot is a individual interface; they all bridge from one slot to another on interrupt.



I'm impressed by some of RME's products. Great specs. Horribly overpriced though. If you considered that their digital interface only cards go for near $1000 dollars, along with the knowledge that nearly all twisted pair interfaces are derivatives of ethernet technology which was amortized long-ago... well, you just have to wonder about their other products as well. The stuff is only for those who can afford it.

Anyway, this is all by the by... I'm sure titetrax knows neither of us is trying to bozo him.

hey @titetrax.

sounds like this might possibly also be a sample rate conversion issue of some sort.  i.e. say you're in sonar and you click a long clip in the media browser - in the browser and console there is a pause and you'll see a message saying "sample rate conversion" and this can cause some delays and a quick stutter that i've noticed in itunes sometimes. 

fwiw the settings i use for my realtek audio are as follows:
when you go into the sound settings on your machine and double click speakers make sure if there's an enhancements tab that disable all enhancements is checked. 
also, under the advanced tab select either a 24 bit or low-ish 48 or 96khz sample rate. the 192khz option causes all kindsa grief on my system.  16 bit 44.1khz causes some weirdness sometimes as well which i don't get but whatever...
when you double click on the recording devices tab and bring up the microphone settings make sure they match the speaker settings. 

the other thing is on these new systems ALWAYS use WASAPI when available. 
WDM was discontinued with windows vista.  ASIO4ALL is an asio emulator/wrapper that uses WDM (which is now an emulator to ensure backwards compatability) to wrap to WASAPI. so, you've got two middlemen running in between the audio system. not worth it. 

the other thing in sonar that seems helpful is going into preferences/audio/configuration file and scrolling to the bottom of the list.  set minimizedriverstatechanges to 3, increase extrapluginbufs, and set dropoutmsec to around 750 or so.  and, under playback settings, set driver mode to wasapi. 

hth 
 

^^^ good stuff ^^^

  Yea the PCI to PCI bridging thing has complicated things a bit here; I pretty much had to do process of elimination for each card to find the right IRQ scheme for me. That could be an issue if Titetrax tries the X-fi.
 I got to thinking why I upgraded when I did. I had no issues capturing live audio with their X-fi. As far as the reverb that us on by default, that can be turned off in their control panel.
 If I remember correctly, I had to upgrade because of the onboard MIDI chip on the X-fi was not working with soft synths very well. I had just upgraded to Sonar 7, my first vsti host.
 Just sayin' if you try that X-fi and are having issues with MIDI, that might be the deal breaker with the X-fi for you.