To all those with crackles and pops

Hi All, I bought this card on Thursday just gone, spent all Friday and Saturday trying to get it to work without crackling on my desktop (worked perfectly first time on my laptop), gave up, emailed the shop for a returns request, after buying a new 256mb Ati graphics card, a new PCI USB 2.0 card and a powered USB 2.0 hub (none of which made a bit of difference).

Had one last thought out of desperation, that maybe plugging the computer into a seperate dedicated wall socket might make a difference, and guess what - it worked.

I've got latency down to 16ms (8ms USB buffer is as low as my system can handle), no crackles, pops etc.

Now I'm considering upgrading my power supply from 350w to something a little higher, as it's obviously a power issue at the ports.

Maybe this is obvious and I was just being dumb, but I thought I'd post my findings in the hope it can help others, coz when this baby works, it really kicks ass!

 

No, you weren't dumb, nor was the cause of your difficulty very obvious. The PSU is just about the last thing people consider when they have problems like you had. Just remember, never evaluate a power supply strictly on the basis of output in total watts. The newer and more meaningful measurement is efficiency. You can have a 350W high efficiency PSU that will power the most fully loaded PC and a 500W PSU that will barely handle a minimally configured bargain PC. A minimum efficiency rating is 70. Higher is of course more desirable but about the best rating you can find is in the high-70's. . And don't forget to look for one that also runs cool and quiet.

 

thanks for the advice on PSU's MisterH, that'll come in really handy

To update, I just got a totally better performance situation outa the soundcard by turning off APCI in XP and the bios, it's made a MASSIVE difference!

Now I can run my TC powercore compact, which I still couldn't do after changing wall sockets - yeeehaaa!!

 

i could solve my performance problem by buying a pcmcia usb 2 card with an own power adapter that serves the ak1 now. so there is no problem with power consumtion now. runs better and crackles / pops are gone unde 48khz / 1ms usb 6-10ms latency depending to the played instrument.