Motu 8pre pops, drop-outs, on all sound players

[manpower music]

The following is a correspondance from the Motu guys to try and figure out what is wrong with my machine. As you can see the motu guy wants to change the sidspeed on the registry key but thats not working, I always get an error message. Anybody else have this problem or heard of it?

"Try deleting the two entries SidSpeed and SidSpeedOld. Are you able to right-click and delete these SidSpeed entries?"

NO

(From previous call.. tried restoring default security settings from microsoft support. However, user is unable to access/create/edit values in the registry. Suggested troubleshooting OS with Microsoft. Also, test 8pre on other system to verify functionality)

It's clear that there is a Firewire communication problem on this system. What's unclear is whether the OS is problematic or if the Firewire adapter is malfunctioning. I usually consider an OS install as a last resort.

ANTEC who built this machine swears that because it's service pak3 you can't change the sidspeed value anyway. But they were not much help either. The popping and dropouts are getting worse too.

Sound familiar to anybody out there?

[WayneM]

What chip set is your firewire port?

[manpower music]

What chip set is your firewire port?

IEEE 1394 Bus host controllers
Texas Instruments
Driver Version:5.1.2535.0

Not sure if this is what you mean...how do I find out what chip set I have?

[HotShot]

A TI (Texas Instruments) firewire port chipset is what you should use.

You should go download and run a program called DPC Latency checker. It is a program that monitors device drivers bad behavior which causes audio programs to have clicks, pops, and drop outs. Run it and see if you get any readings that spike into the yellow or red areas of the chart. If you do, that means you have some drivers that aren't behaving good. You would have to disable devices one by one in Device manager to find out what device drivers are causing the spikes.

If you have a wireless network adapter/card, that should be the first thing to disable, and then see how things go using your DAW software.

The 8Pre is a good unit with drivers capable of running the audio interface stable at low hardware buffer settings. You have some troubleshooting to do.

The DPC Latency Checker can be found at the following link: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Picardo]

I had the exact same problem with my 8pre. Since all set ups are different I will tell you what I did. First my setup. HP dv7-3160us laptop, w/ AMD Anthlon processors, internal firewire,(JMB38X chipset, I think), MOTU 8pre. I have successfully used this same 8pre with VIA and NVIDIA chipsets also. The problem is how the computer is loaded, how many other devices do you have running, what other software/drivers is running, and what are the IRQ's for these devices. Because I am using a laptop I had to look internally. I figured out that I had to disable most other devices, CD/DVD, webcam, wireless, built in sound devices. My internal firewire bus was trying to run multiple device host controllers when the devices weren't there. In my laptop there were 4 running host controllers running on the same PCI bus. They were listed as JMB38X hd, sd, mmc, xd host controllers. By process of elimination I found one that worked and turned off the rest. Now the 8pre is working. But I am finding out that I need to do the same setup every time in order to get things to work properly. I have only tested in with a full band recording situation once though. And I still need to make sure all levels are set. I hope my progress helps.