Ultralite hisses pops crackles

[larrydavid]

Hi
I bought a motu ultralite about 4 years ago and it was great. Until I updated the drivers and firmware to v1.15 last year. Since then I have had nothing but pops crackles and hisses from the motu. I know its not Cubase 4 thats the issue because the noises happen even when the system is idle. When I do use Cubase 4 or itunes the noises get worse and more frequent.

I use xp pro sp2
AMD athlon 64x2 Dual Core
4200+ 2.21Ghz
4 Gb RAM

Customer support was atrocious when I tried on the phone - they didnt know, and by email - well, they say it would take a couple of business days but 3 months?

Does anyone have any suggestions for me to try - sometimes its unusable its so bad.

[larrydavid]

Well I went into control panel add/remove programs and under:
"Motu Firewire/USB2" I clicked on "support information" and it says version 1.00.0000
Is this supposed to be this version - I did update it but it gives this version.

[larrydavid]

I increased my virtual memory to 4000mb-6000mb...no change.
Defragged...no change
turned off all virus checkers etc...no change.
Tried decreasing the amount of background services....no change.
When idle the pf usage is between 140mb to 300mb. When running a c4 project it gies to 1.2gb-is this normal?

In Device Manager - the Texas Instrument bus host Controller does not have "legacy" in brackets after it - is this the cause? If so - how do i get around it?

[TheRealRoach]

It sounds like the firmware and driver update were the problem. The first thing I would do it is downgrade the firmware (you would need to find a copy of the original somewhere), and revert back to the previous driver.

A general rule of thumb is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Once a new studio system is working properly I create a bootable drive image backup and then never update anything until I get a new system (typically about 5 years).

[larrydavid]

But where do I get the firmware downgrade from? I have googled it millions of times and been on every site I can possibly find. Motu say its impossible to downgrade firmware even on a mac but I know this is not true because I have seen a website that talk about passing it around - the link they gave no longer works. I was plain stupid to update it when I didnt need to (actually the reason I did it was to see if the updated cuemix would give me a 3 monitor set up - which it didnt). I have tried downgrading the driver but it doesnt help.
Anyone know of/have any firmware downgrades to the very first version?

[TheRealRoach]

bad deal. Motu doesn't play nice when it comes to providing older versions of anything. The only thing I would try is to check if there are any other firmware versions, even if it isn't the exact one you had before.

[larrydavid]

Thanks for a reply. Where can I get a downgrade from? As i mention above I have tried every possible site I can find and even emailed people on sites who have also asked for the downgrade. Please help!