MR816csx audio dropouts

same problems here with my new MR 816csx:

CUBASE 6
no problems (win7, 64bit) at all BUT if i change the volume of a clip during playback —> dropouts

YOUTUBE
dropouts every 5 to 10 seconds when playing youtube-videos in FULLSCREEN

seems the problem is the graphic/video-card!
any ideas /solutions / experiences???
thx
helmut

Sorry to add to the list instead of a cure but I have a Windows 7 64bit Core i5 netbook with 8GB ram and I have tried everything, including moving to a TI firewire cardbus disabled everything including the graphics driver so that I lost the 2nd screen I would use to record live with. Nothing worked. The graphics were so low the only thing that I could see in cubase was the control unit and when I pressed play the dropouts were just as bad. I also tried my N12 on the laptop (works a treat in the studio on Vista ultamate 64bit) and it was the same. I’ve sent word to steinberg but as yet heard nothing back. I really don’t know what to do next. If I thought installing the studio vista would cure everything I’d give it a go but the laptops 6mths old and all that hastle just to find out its the same would kill me.
I’ve only had the MR8 a few days and I’m sure I could return it but I really want it to work. I used an Audiofire 4 on the same notebook a week ago and after increasing the buffer to 190 it worked perfect for multitrack recording, at 512 the MR8 can’t play 1 single imported music track or an itunes song without stuttering and droping out. I’ll have spent nearly £1000 by the time I add up the unit and cards etc so keeping it as a studio ornament is really not an option. If anyone can come up with a solution there are by the looks of things a lot of us who really need it. :frowning:

Update,
Trolling through the forum archive I came accross a post that - sorry I forgot who posted it but I’m extreemly grateful to you - said they disabled the ACPI under battery in the device manager and it solved their problems. Well I tried this and for the first time Cubase 6 played back the track of music with no drop outs. I then went back and disabled network and over the past few hours I’ve been able to do test recordings of an ipod backing track with me singing and some harmony overdubs. So one stereo music track and one vocal track together no drop outs. DPC Latency checker is mostly green ocasionally yellow. Although I have still seen the very odd red but cubase is still working as stated above. I don’t think this has fixed it to rock solid status by any means but a few hours ago it couldn’t play back 1 track for a few seconds so if you have not tried this battery fix its worth a go. It still can’t play an itunes track but if Cubase works I don’t care. I really only need this to track our band for albums, all my editing will be on the N 12 in the studio and its solid (thank God) but it would be great if a new driver that solved all these problems came out. A card this expensive should really work out the box.

i have the same prob since i installed Cubase 6 and the new driver for my MR816 CSX…!!
With the driver 1.7 i had every sec dropouts then i changed to 1.6 and now i have less dropouts but they still there…
I’m really mad with steinberg i hope work hard an any solution for this massive problem!!!
Cubase 5.5 on my Old G5 Quad was perfect and now i have a Mac pro and Cubase 6 and i can’t produce because dropouts and crashing Cubase…!!

Try using a PS2 keyboard and mouse. USB can sometimes cause DPC latency spikes, which results in audio dropouts.

If your graphics card is an NVidia card, then it may indeed be the problem. There are known issues with the NVidia drivers. You can try a cheap ATI graphics card instead.
It might also be that your graphics card and the MR816 share the same IRQ.

I’m getting random dropouts on playback. Here’s my system:

Cubase 6 & Wavelab 7

Intel Q6700 2.67GHz
4 GB RAM Mushkin Redline 5-5-5-12
Asus Maximus formula
ATI 4670 GPU

W7 64 bit

MR816CSX, MR816X, CC121

Tonight, I’ll try DPC Latency checker and some of the other recommendations on this thread. I’d appreciate it if a Steinberg mod would chime in and give more specific info about disabling devices in device manager (like the order of devices to try and how far to go) and other tweaks. In the mod-written thread, I can’t read the linked threads that are in German and I can’t find the equivalent threads in English because the website keeps locking up when I try.

I don’t believe that the onboard firewire is a problem as this same PC has run an n12 flawlessly for 2 years under XP 32 bit. I do remember needing to tweak the firewire setup to get the n12 running but I don’t remember the tweak. I’ll mill around looking for that tonight.

In my case, it just appears to be a playback dropout issue. I recorded 16 tracks on the CSX/X combo, mixed in Cubase, mastered in Wavelab to 44.1/16 WAV. When I play the master with Cubase, Wavelab or Media Player, I get random dropourts, but if I move the mastered file to another PC, it plays without dropouts. One last issue - the Maximus Formula ships with a PCI-e soundcard and I had it in place when loading W7, but I did not install the drivers. I’m wondering if I should uninstall that sound card…

The first devices you could disable to try fix the dropouts are:

  • wifi adapter
  • onboard lan
  • onboard soundcard
  • usb devices

In general, anything with a badly written driver can cause audio dropouts.

What brand is your firewire chip?

Make sure that your energy settings in Windows 7 are set to “high performance”.

In Windows 7 it might be necessary in some cases to install the legacy Firewire driver in order to fix dropouts, but that should be the last resort.

First thing to do is check if you have DPC latency issues.

I do not have a wifi adapter. I disabled the onboard lan and the problem vanished. I’m probably going to remove the onboard sound card. I didn’t install the drivers for it when I did the W7 install because I knew I’d be using the MR-816, so there’s really no need to have it on the mobo.

I think the Asus Rampage firewire chip is a Via. I used the same motherboard with an n12 and had zero issues so I’m not worried about the Fw chip. My USB devices are: mouse, Cubase/Wavelab dongle, CC121. Energy settings and overall OS setup are optimized. This PC is dedicated to audio, is not on the Internet, has no antivirus, etc. I did a live recording last Sunday with 16 tracks running and got great results at 44.1/24. This was my first opportunity with the daisy chained MRs and also my first time out with a Universal Audio LA-610 Mk II. It was awesome on vocals - the singer does blues with Koko Taylor type dynamics. That channel strip rocks and has so much range. I need three more of those suckers. Drool / off.

Great you got it fixed!
Enjoy your MR816’s

I can’t use my ipad to control cubase vst because when I turn on the wifi the cubase starts droputs :confused:
when the steinberg going fix it ???

Just to update this thread, I bought a used MR816x, and was having dropouts like crazy. I am used to compatibility issues setting up audio, so didn’t panic but began surfing for a solution. I have an AMD Phenom II 4-core, multi-SSD system, with Asus mobo, running WIN 7 , 64-bit. I downloaded and installed the latest driver pack, and insured I had the latest firmware. I tried various latency settings to no avail. Finally, I found this thread and on a lark I followed one of the above posts about going into Control Panel, then to the POWER OPTIONS. The thread above called it the “Battery” settings, but it just uses the icon of a battery, it is called power. In my iteration of WIN7/64, It gives no advanced option to set ACPI, instead, it just defaults to a medium power saving scheme–below there, you see a radio button marked “HIGH PERFORMANCE.” Select that, close, reboot. Done! Problem solved. The issue, at least for me, was an underpowered Firewire section built onto the mobo. I was glad it was solved so quickly. Have had this kind of thing go on for days or weeks! Cheers all, hope this helps someone.

~Kurtis
Austin, TX

I am new to this and can’t say I know exactly what a drop out is, but it sounds like the problem I am having, when recording and all the sound “just drops” for a split second leaving a pop type sound on the recording.

I recently got a new desktop with windows 8 (64 bit) and have been having dropouts (as described above) at least every couple of minutes, sometimes a lot more. I also get these dropouts when I click on other programs or open a web page while cubase is open. These dropouts happen only when I have cubase open and channeled through my MR816csx. I do not get these drop outs when I record in cubase through my computers (beats) sound card, I also do not get these dropouts when just the MR editor is open or using my MR816csx to lay down some tracks into Audacity (a free recording program). I have just been using the software that came with the MR816 (CubaseAI4), but downloaded the trial version of Cubase elements 6, (64 bit version) to see if it made a difference, unfortunately the same thing happens in 6. I installed the SIIG FireWire 2-Port PCIe NN-E20012-S2 with TI chipset and use a Black Lion MKII external word clock, I’ve tried switching to the internal word clock, but to no avail. I have tried playing with buffer size, direct monitoring, sample rate, and am completely baffled as to why this only happens when using my MR816 with cubase. Anybody with similar problems?

I am using an HP Envy h8 1420t with 16 GB ram and intel core i7 processor, the weakest link in my computer is the Intel HD Graphics card, but I think the computer overall should be more than adequate to handle what i’m throwing at it. Although I had other issues on occasion, I did not have this problem in Vista or Windows 7 with the on board 4 pin firewire port on my now dead HP laptop.

Dear all,

I have sent the following to Steinberg (see quote below), they do not have an answer to the problem yet.
As you can read, it seems that is has nothing to do with performance, power settings, etc.
Somehow the situation is not stable, could be driver, firmware, conflicting stuff. I don’t know.
The only thing I know is when I connect my firewire back to my Mackie Onyx 1640, it runs undisturbed, whatever i do.

Hopefully Steinberg will come up with a resolution soon.

Martin


<<<
Hi dear Steinberges,

This week I bought myself Cubase 7. :slight_smile: hoera! Many thanks for all your effort for this game changer!
I combine Cubase using a Mackie Onyx 1640 firewire, which works perfectly.

When I saw Cubase 7’s new features (integrated Control Room) with zero-latency different cue sends, I definitely had to buy the MR816 CSX. I have bought this device second handed today.

After installing the
Tools for MR 1.7.4 · 64-Bit · 90 MB
MR816 CSX/X Firmware V1.10 - 680 KB
I couldn’t wait to try the device.

But unfortunately as soon as I open a relatively simple project (just a groove agent and a halion channel) it hackles, like it could not handle the complexity of it. (like my old computer with a very very large project)

I have tried to raise the buffer level / samples set to max and checked several times to see if the yamaha steinberg driver was selected correctly. But clicks, stops and hackles.

I can say this was the last thing I was expecting from the CSX.
I shut down Cubase, switched the firewire back to Onyx and restarted Cubase again with the same project. No hackles or clicks.
Again with the CSX, checked if there are any conflicting settings in the F4 window, but couldnt find any irregularities. And again the clicks.

I know the CSX is a masterpiece, so I am still hoping I am just missing something here.
I really don’t want to bring the CSX back to the previous owner, because I hope it is not a hardware but a software problem.

I hope you guys can help me lead the way to solve this problem.

Many thanks in advance!

Regards Martin"

martin.butzelaar@gmail.com

read all…

Guys, seriously.

I think* this solved my problem.
IRQ conflict. I disabled my network adapter and it works fine. Enabled and hackles. Disabled and works fine.

*But I am not closing this before I have build a pretty big project which works fine.
To be continued…

Also try the utility software that comes with the MR816 driver dowanlod. read the notes before.

I’m also having dropouts issue, this doesn’t only happen in Cubase, it also happens when I set my default Playback as my MR816 and play some music or sounds. The problem seems to occur more often when there’s more activity like opening stuffs or browsing the web.

I’m using Windows 8 64bit with Cubase 6.5. I’m also using a TI chip firewire card.

One point to note is that my 2 other firewire interfaces, my Saffire Pro 24 DSP, as well as a Phonic Helix Board 18 works perfectly fine, I never had any dropouts before prior to owning the MR816csx.

Also, my MR816 works perfectly fine on my MacBook Pro, with Cubase and Pro Tools.

This is rather disappointing, how can such a higher end product have such issues, it has to be issues with the MR816csx drivers as my 2 other firewire interfaces works fine.

Had the same problems with windows 8pro, Cubase 7.0x and MR.
How did I solve it:
-turn off MR and CC, only turn on when I mention.
-made a clean install Windows 8pro on my pc.
updated all hardware drivers (mainboard, graphic card).
update Windows 8 pro.
download NET Framework 3.5 including 2.0 and 3.0 and install and check for updates.
-Installed Cubase 7.0.0 64 bit (don’t start Cubase)
-Installed Cubase 7.0.2 64 bit (don’t start Cubase)
-Installed latest driver CC (CC121 V174 win64)
-Installed latest driver MR (MR V174 win64)
Turn on CC and windows will install driver.
Turn on MR and windows will install driver.
-locate your MR V174 win64 directory on your harddisk.
go to utility and run ysfwutility, change IEEE1394 buffer size to Large, click ok and restart computer.
-go to Configuration - System - Device manager - IEEE 1394 Host controller.
right-click on Host Controller and click -update driver software,
click -Browse my computer for driver,
click -Let me pick from a list…
choose 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller
click -next (when finished restart your computer)

start Cubase 7.0.2

click devices - devices setup
vst audio system, Audio priority = boost, activate Multi processing, Asio guard and activate stenberg audio
power scheme.

click yamaha steinberg FW ASIO - control panel and change asio buffer size to 1024.
close - apply and ok.


This works for me !!!
Please let me know if it works for you.

Regards,
Twan

That’s too many unnecessary steps IMO, changing the IEEE1394 buffer size from small to medium solves my dropout problems, but I don’t like the extra latency due to the buffer size.

Why does my 2 other firewire interfaces work but not this expensive MR816csx, frustrating…

It’s pretty simple…cause the drivers are very very very picky, don’t get me wrong here the hardware on this machine is amazing but the software…well it suxx, bigtime.
It should be reprogrammed from scratch not only to do what it promises to do but also work without all this hassles.
That said after allot of frustration I managed to make it work on my rig but it takes allot of time/energy and knowledge to accomplice such a task…
The official support here is below zero and it all depends on users…
I recently bought a kurzweil product and comparing the support…well there is no comparison…
I don’t really get it, Steinberg techs are either snobs or not up for the job…I mean if they could make reliable drivers why are they not delivering…
At the end of the day after allthis frustration we (the end users) aren’t the ones that have to say sorry and be polite to people ignoring us.
I was holding this for too long.
An early mr816 adopter.

PS: I really love this hardware…not the software though.