Hi again, everyone.
I’m assuming this is the correct place for this question, but if not, perhaps one of the moderators would re-locate it as need be.
As some of you will know from my other recent post, I have a fairly archaic system: Cubase 5.1 running on Windows 7. In light of the frankly frightening cost both in terms of finance and the attendant learning curves, the thought of updating either or both of these ( and let’s face it, if I update one I’ve pretty much got no choice but to update the other ) is disconcerting to say the least.
That being said: I’m using a Tascam US-122 Mk. II sound-card, and have been for upwards of a decade. It’s worked fine until now, but I’m starting to get the impression that it might be getting toward retirement age. The main symptom is that when I play back a song in Cubase, at various points during the playback, there will be a few moments of what I can only describe as high-pitched jangling - quite quiet, but enough to notice. As it is that this occurs at random times - not the same places every time - and in different songs, I’m doubtful that the problem is related to anything specific to Cubase or to any particular song. I’ve attempted to update the driver, but of course Tascam have long since stopped providing or updating a driver for this unit - certainly not one that will work with Windows 7, at any rate.
I’m genuinely frightened to ask the question, but … if it comes to it, anyone got any thoughts as to what a good replacement will be, that will work with the system in question …?
You didn’t give system specs though, just Win 7.
What mobo/CPU are you running and where are you located?
I honestly didn’t think about that …! I’m not in the studio at the moment - my office computer is separate. I can’t remember the spec offhand … I’ll need to check it when I’m next in the studio, either tomorrow or Monday morning. I’m located in Kent, England … is that important?
Every once in a while someone posts here or on another forum and asks for recommendations and then it turns out they’re in a country with limited options. So it’s just good to know this right away.
Wish I had a good rec for you, but alas I don’t. I still have an older Lynx TWO-b that’s fantastic that I’m not using, but it’s PCI and I’m not in Kent so… otherwise I’d let you borrow it.
If I was running Cubase 5.1 on Windows 7 I would seriously be looking to buy a new computer, regardless of the soundcard/interface.
I’m hoping you don’t have that thing connected to the internet(?). From the sound of your post money is your biggest drawback. So my suggestion would be to start and put a little bit away each week until you can afford something a bit more up to date. Since it appears you’ve got your money’s worth out of this machine I would say that any investment in a new machine is not going to be as expensive as you think since you’ll probably have it for another 10 years.
Right now, there is this Cubase Artist Starter Kit on offer for 151 £
You could keep the audiointerface (basic but solid with decent converters, driver, latency) and Cubase Artist 14. You could as well sell the Mic, cable, pop filter and the tri-pod to mitigate the costs since you probably have all of this.
You could also run versions prior to 14 which are not so finicky when it comes to system requirements. Maybe a slightly older and used computer would be just fine to run everything you want. Doesn’t always have to be the latest most expensive stuff to get a really decent performance. I guess you will be thrilled what’s possible by now coming from Cubase 5.1!!
I buy most of my gear from the used market.
You easily get 30% to 40% off and can get much better gear for the same money.
Well worth the time investment.
But don’t give up too quickly on your existing gear.
You report the problem is only during playback, so your actual recording is not affected, is it?
Is your Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit?
Hello all.
Well: first of all, let me get the technical stuff out of the way. The Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installation is 64-bit. The motherboard is an ASUSTek Sabertooth 55i ( LGA 1156 ). The CPU is an IntelCore i7 870 @ 2.93GHz. The RAM ( not that anyone asked, but in case it’s important ) is 8.00Gb dual-channel DDRS @ 939MHz. The case is black ( …!.. ). If it matters, as far as I can determine, the computer was built in February 2011.
Referring firstly to Easto’s comment about buying a new computer: whilst I understand the reasoning, and I say this with everything crossed, if it ain’t broke I don’t intend to try to fix it. Aside from the current sound-card problems ( back to that in a minute - well: two minutes ), everything else about the machine seems fine ( God help me if I’ve jinxed this ). Aside from the cost of upgrading the machine in terms of the hardware alone ( both my current computers were custom built by my son, who unfortunately now lives a very long way away ), added to the cost of the current software ( Windows, Cubase etc. ), as mentioned previously, there’s the learning curve associated with all of that - all of which, as the situation stands, would be done for no other purpose than to get me back to where I am right now.
Ah, I hear you say ( Reco29 ), but just think of all the knobs and knockers that come with all this new technology! - Just think how much you’ll be able to do that you can’t do now!
No, I know you didn’t actually say that - and I hasten to add, I’m not attacking you or any other contributor for offering what you clearly believe to be helpful information, and I certainly don’t mean to seem ungrateful. However, the reality of this is that it’s rather like putting the Wright brothers at the helm of the starship Enterprise. The fact that the equipment would be capable of far more than I’m used to, unfortunately doesn’t mean that I would instantly acquire the knowledge to be able to use it properly, much as I wish it were otherwise. It may be the case at some point that I’ll have no other choice; and when that time comes, and there is literally absolutely no other choice, so be it. For the moment, with the best will in the world, replacing the computer - even with a used one that’s not as mega-expensive as a new one - in order to fix what I think are the current sound card issues is, from my point of view, rather like buying a new car because the ashtray is broken.
No, I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but you see what I’m getting at.
Before I answer Y-D’s question, let me also just thank Mattias for the kind offer of loaning me the soundcard … as you say, if I only lived in New York!
After all of that, back to the original problem … or not. To directly answer Y-D’s question, no, the existing recordings aren’t affected; but here’s the weird thing …
I spent three and a half hours in the studio this morning and the problem didn’t occur once. Not that I’m complaining …!.. but I have absolutely no idea why this should be the case. The only remaining oddity from when this first came to light and I uninstalled and reinstalled it is the fact that now, I seem to need to reassign it as the default sound card for the system ( as opposed to, for Cubase ) every time I start the computer. Not that that’s a huge problem; it’s maybe fifteen seconds’ work - I’m just not sure why it’s happening. But the weird, high-pitched ‘jangly’ sound that started all of this seems to have disappeared entirely. I’ve tried playing back stored professional music tracks ( which previously behaved the same way ) and they too now seem to play back just fine. Of course, whether or not all this will still be true tomorrow or the next day, the way things have gone so far, is anyone’s guess.
I would love to believe that the problem has just ‘healed up’, but of course we all know that doesn’t actually happen; so, working on the assumption that there does in fact still end up being a problem to solve, a possible solution occurred to me that I don’t know why I didn’t think of sooner.
What would be wrong with just buying another identical Tascam sound card? They seem to be readily available on eBay in the order of thirty to forty quid; even on Amazon it’s ‘only’ £70, which although it’s not cheap, is still a lot cheaper than some of the other possible alternatives.
I’d be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on that, or on any of the other stuff above; but finally, let me just emphasise again that nothing I’ve said is intended in any way to seem ungrateful, much less critical, of any of you who have kindly responded so far.
Firstly, no offense taken at all, all good 
Secondly, If you are happy with your system as is - brilliant! No need to buy the latest shiny tools. At the end of the day it is all about creativity and your very own workflow. Whatever floats your boat is just fine!
If you can get the exact same soundcard that has proven to work just fine with your system, well, go for it I’d say. However, maybe it’s not the soundcard at all. I would wait for the time being and see what’s happening.
Good luck and enjoy making music!
This.
This is what makes me think it might e.g. be transient electrical interference – perhaps a neighbour has a new EV charger, or maybe an electric fence; or someone getting their cappucino delivered by drone (electric motors) flying overhead. There are just so many possibilties … and when was the last time your cleaned the connectors to and from the card? Is everything properly grounded?
In my experience I’ve never had a soundcard fail, and older, stable systems tend to fail suddenly and completely, rather than through slow degradation, so you might be wasting your money on a second-hand card, itself of potentially dubious provenance, with the added risk of dismantling the PC to replace it. On the other hand, if one is readily available, it might be no harm to have it as a spare anyway – even if you do end up not needing it!
Perhaps you could capture the high-pitched jangling sound (acoustically) with a seperate recorded or a phone? If you could upload a few seconds of it here, we might be able to identify what’s causing it, or at least provide some clues?
The reason I asked about whether your Windows 7 was 32- or 64-bit was because the suggested USB audio interface probably doesn’t come with 32-bit drivers.
As far as waiting and seeing before hastily buying another soundcard, albeit an identical one, yes, sound advice - particularly in light of the fact that it is, as you say, highly debatable whether or not the problem actually is the soundcard.
On the face of it, none of the examples you’ve mentioned seem particularly likely: none of my immediate neighbours have EVs, there certainly aren’t any electric fences nearby, and one of my neighbours ( fifty yards away ) runs a food wagon outside their house, so I doubt any of us would be using drones to order our coffee - although you’ve made me fancy a cappucino now. Electrical interference from any outside source has never occurred before ( in the five years or so I’ve had this particular studio ), although that being said, I accept that something unexpected could always occur at any time. I installed all the electrics and basically built everything inside the studio myself, so I’m pretty confident about the grounding being adequate, although again I accept that breakdowns do occur. I must confess I haven’t cleaned the connectors to and from the card in a long time - the MIDI and audio in and out leads are pretty much permanently plugged in, so there’s very rarely been a need.
I must admit I’m certainly questioning my initial assumption that it must be the sound card that’s the problem - partly for precisely the reason you mention and partly because the ‘jangling’ noise has not occurred again since. Precisely by way of avoiding the risk of any kind of interference, I don’t usually have my mobile phone in the studio, but I’ll take it in there for a few days just in case there is a recurrence of the noise. Weirdly, this morning it made a strange ‘sputtering’ noise when I started playing a song; I shut the whole lot down and re-started the computer, and it was fine.
All of this, I know, leads further and further away from the notion that the soundcard is or ever was the problem ( although of course it leaves me no nearer knowing what is the problem, unless it’s just a weirdly coincidental confluence of events ). I think I probably jumped to that conclusion because the driver stopped working after I had to do a cold shutdown and I had to uninstall and re-install the card; it just seemed like an obvious candidate. Having said that, I like to think of myself as being reasonably logical, and since when the jangling was happening at all it was only happening to sound played from the computer through the soundcard, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable guess.
As it is, as I say, the jangling seems to have stopped, and the ‘sputtering’ went away after a reboot. If I’m able to record any anomalous noises in the immediate future, I’ll be glad to post them on here for your perusal. In the meantime, crossed fingers seem to be as good a solution as any.
I haven’t read all the posts here, some are a bit long for my goldfish-like attention span, so apologies if this has been mentioned.
The Tascam isn’t actually a card, it’s a USB interface (I have a card - an RME AIO PCIe card). A common problem, or so I’ve heard, is dodgy USB ports/cables. Have you tried switching them around?
Again, apologies if this has been asked.
My own apologies for the delay in responding. In fact, for reasons best known to itself, the problem does seem to have gone away now: in retrospect, I think maybe I was panicking in light of having had to do the cold shutdown.
And yes, now you mention it, of course the Tascam is an interface rather than a sound card: that’s why it’s got the word ‘interface’ clearly printed on the front of it.
Doh!!
I wasn’t being picky, it’s just that each has it’s own set of issues.
Good that it’s back to business as usual!
[ sigh ] …
It would seem it’s not quite as much back to business as usual as I’d first thought.
The intermittent jangly noise is back, and still with no apparent pattern or evident correlation with any other factor(s). It’s definitely not specific to Cubase - if I quickly switch to another song in my music library, it does the same thing. It comes and goes of it’s own accord and can last anything from a couple of seconds to a minute or two.
However, now, something even stranger is going on. I was recording a vocal track in Cubase, doing multiple takes as I usually do to pick the best bits from each take. Completely out of the blue, on one of the takes, it started to record all the background tracks along with the vocal that was being recorded through the microphone - not cleanly, in a ‘mixed down’ sort of a way ( although having said that, it hasn’t been mixed down yet ), but in a harsh, overloaded, overdriven sort of a way. This has happened maybe four or five times now, and it can start whilst a vocal track is actually in the process of being recorded ( the track being fine up to that point ). Re-starting Cubase doesn’t seem to make any difference; re-starting the computer itself is the only thing that seems to make it go away, although even then it can come back again if I’m using it for long enough. As far as I can see, I’m not doing anything any differently than I’ve ever done, and certainly not slap bang in the middle of recording a track!
Another recent oddity, not nearly such a pain as all of the above, but still an oddity: ever since the cold shutdown mentioned previously, I can’t seem to make the Tascam the default output for the computer itself, i.e. for everything non-Cubase. Cubase itself remembers it each time, but if I want to play anything outside of Cubase, I have to go into the ‘sound’ settings and re-set the Tascam as the default output - which will work, but only for as long as that session. After the computer has been shut down and started up again, I have to re-set it. As I say, not the worst thing in the world in the context of the other stuff, but just weird.
Just a thought: Why don’t you a basic audiointerface at a reasonable price like Steinberg’s URC series that comes with updated drivers and check if the problem persists. If it does, well, give it back. Maybe you even know someone who can borrow you an audiointerface for a couple of days?
Maybe this is the easiest way to find out.