Sound Output problem with Alesis MultiMix 8

October 11, 2006 8:52 AM

I bought an Alesis MultiMix 8 the other day, which is an 8 input firewire interface. It works OK but the main problem I have is that the stereo out (from the computer to the mixer) cuts out very frequently.

It will go anywhere from 1s to about 10s with no cutout, and then it'll cut out for anywhere from a short period of time to about 5s. It does this whether I am monitoring what I am recording or just playing something back.

It records fine, I can listen to the tracks with another audio out and they sound normal. At first I was worried that it was missing data while recording but it's not.

At the moment I am using my US-122 as an output soundcard and the alesis as an input sound card but this sucks, why should I have to use 2 products?

All the drivers are the new ones from the web site (March 06) and I've upgraded the firmware to the most recent version. I have fiddled with the settings to no avail (latency settings, etc).

I'm using Cubase SX if it matters... The computer is oldish, a 1.5ghz athlon, 1gig ram, VIA based firewire card.

My main suspicions thus far are:
* crappy drivers
* crappy computer
* crappy firewire card (everyone recommends the TI based ones...)
* crappy firewire cable (recording works fine though, and that's much higher bandwidth)

posted by RustyBrooks to media & arts (7 comments total)

For one more possibility, you may want to check that nothing is sharing the IRQ...often times sound cards will use the same hardware interrupt as another component. Not so sure about firewire adapters sharing an interrupt, but you may as well check both.

You can check which HW device is assigned to which interrupt in Device Manager (I'm assuming you're running Windows based on your specs, correct me if I'm wrong) by going under VIEW->RESOURCES BY TYPE and expanding the menu for IRQ.

If this is the case (shared IRQ), you may be able to force the assignment of a unique IRQ in the CMOS. This was an issue I had with similar symptoms when using an M-Audio Delta 1010 internal PCI and forcing it to use a particular IRQ solved the problem.
posted by edverb at 9:05 AM on October 11, 2006

I had a similar problem with a different firewire interface and discovered the problem was my built-in wireless hardware. Disable wireless networking while you are working and see if that helps.
posted by toastchee at 9:10 AM on October 11, 2006

Yeah, I heard that wireless thing too. That seems bizarre to me if it's something to do with wireless. It actually kind of makes sense if there is an IRQ conflict between your wireless and your other device, as edverb mentioned. I will give that a shot when I get home (checking out the IRQ). I actually have already tried disabling wireless, it didn't work for me.
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:18 AM on October 11, 2006

Oh and yeah, it's windows xp.
posted by RustyBrooks at 10:18 AM on October 11, 2006

I had this problem with the US 122 originaly. It turned out that I had the midi settings set fot the computers internal midi not the US 122's midi. Check that.
posted by gergtreble at 1:08 PM on October 11, 2006

This device doesn't do midi as far as I know. Maybe it does... I'm not using it for any kind of midi though.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:56 PM on October 11, 2006

I had this problem when I owned a Lexicon interface many many years ago. The major problem was bad drivers, but a lot of my cutouts were definitely related to latency issues. It was necessary for me to tweak the settings (to pretty much unacceptable levels for ASIO drivers, IMHO) in order to prevent cutouts.
posted by fishfucker at 6:39 PM on October 12, 2006