Problems after update to Cubase pro 8

Hi, I really hope someone can help me with a problem which is so frustrating!

I recently updated my studio PC hardware in terms of the processor and motherboard after a motherboard failure. I upgraded from an ASUS P8H67-M PRO motherboard fitted with an Intel I7-2600 processor to an ASUS Z97-PRO Intel Z97-PRO Motherboard fitted with an Intel I7-4790K

Every other aspect of hardware stayed the same as the existing stable system which was running Cubase 6.5 64 bit. I use a Yamaha N12 audio interface connecting by Firewire to a SiiG firewire interface card. There is 12Gb of memory and the video is handled by a Sapphire HD 5450 passive card which supports up to direct x 11. There are also 2 x UAD cards fitted running various plug ins.

The SiiG firewire card is set up with the inbuilt legacy driver and I have installed the latest drivers for the N12. I am running Windows 7 SP1 64bit.

However while rebuilding the system drive I decided to also update to Cubase 8.20 64 bit and now I suffer random audio glitches on playback. Record seems fine but the playback just seems to glitch at random, sometimes crackling slightly and sometimes just going silent for maybe half a second.

Now I know I made an awful mistake changing two things at once, but my instinct is that the PC itself is working OK and I just got something set up wrong. The glitches is not associated with high system load and can happen when the resource meter in Cubase is barely registering. Also rather strangely they do not seem to be affected by changing buffer values, they just seem to happen as and when they choose. I have ASIO guard turned on and tried high, med and low values which didn’t seem to make much difference. If anything (its hard to say) the high value seemed to make the problem worse.

I have done all the typical operating system tweaks I did before when running 6.5. Optimising power schemes and all those things but of course I found I had to keep the display mode set to Aero or Cubase wouldn’t run. Anyway I would have hoped this new set up would be able to run Cubase and the display together (or am I missing something?).

Any ideas for how I can solve this problem would be very much appreciated. Many thanks for your help.

Hi,

Could you try to switch the ASIO-Guard completely Off? Does it work?

Could you try to test your system by using LatencyMon?

Hi Martin, many thanks for your help.

I tested the system last night with DPC latency checker which gave a positive result and I got a typical reading of around 50uS and an absolute maximum reading of 128uS in a 10 minute test.

I then tested the system with LatencyMon which also said the system was Ok, I attach a screenshot of the results


The test said I was Ok to record audio but I found the hard page file count quite alarming just because it was “in the red zone” on the meter. Not sure if that is an issue or not.

I tried turning ASIO guard completely off but hard to say if it made things better or worse. Should I select the higher level of audio boost in the same menu page ?

Many thanks again for your assistance.

Hi,

Do you still have Cubase 6.5 on the system? W It would be great, if we could compare it, to make sure, it IS (or not) in Cubase.

I don’t believe, the heigher level of Audio Boost would help in this case. But you can try it, of course.

Didi you try different Buffer-Sizes?

Hi Martin, I don’t still have 6.5 on the system because it was a new build. Normally I would have of course. I did try different buffer sizes but it didn’t really seem to make much difference. I tried playing audio files from other sources and didn’t have any glitches at all.

Hi,

Unfortunately, we still don’t know, if it’s in Cubase or ASIO driver/sound card.

Could you try to use different sound card, please?

Great idea Martin, I will check it with an alternative sound card and let you know the results.

As an aside these are the Windows “tweaks” I did to the system:

Optimise aero display as per the thread on this forum.
Roll back to legacy fire wire driver
Disable system sounds
Enable DME on each IDE channel
Set processor scheduling to background services
Disable windows firewall, anti virus and spyware software
Disable disk indexing
Disable system restore
Disable auto defrag
Never check for updates
Disable system protection
Disable remote assistance
Disable audio drive write caching
All power settings to “never”
Turn off messages
Never notify
Disabled internal sound card in device manager
Disabled windows defender
Disabled error reporting
Disabled autoplay

One thing I didn’t do which I saw recommended somewhere was to disable hyper threading in BIOS. Is that something you would recommend ?

Hi Martin, well you called it right. I tried an old USB portable interface and no glitching or drop outs at all. I managed to get the firewire interface working by raising the firewire buffer size to high. It seemed to be immune to changes in the ASIO buffer size in Cubase so I guess the problem was in the firewire port itself. Does that make sense ?
Problem is of course that the overall system latency has gone up as a result. I am tempted to give up on firewire and go for a USB interface such as the Steinberg UR824. Do you have any experience of that interface ? Many thanks again for your help. Very much appreciated. Alan

Hi Alan,

I’m glad, you found the core of the issue.

I have an experience as a “common user”. It is always very stable on my system, but I’m a Mac user.