Got the best iMac money can buy - still having ASIO spikes

I just bought 27 inch iMac, then maxed it out to 3.4 Ghz i7 processor, 20 GB RAM, and added a SSD. Before this I was using a MacBook Pro 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB RAM.

I was sure that by upgrading I would be finally done with any spike issues that I’ve had in the past. However to my dismay, I’m still having them. My Activity Meter shows that my Disk is using 0% power (probably because it’s an SSD), which is amazing; and my ASIO meter is hovering at 3% usage. However every 30 seconds it spikes to 100% overload for a split second - which destroys the take. I watched the Activity Meter but couldn’t seem to figure out how it was being caused.

EDIT: I’m also getting kernal errors pretty often. Is there any way for me to track down what’s going on?

Any ideas on what is causing this?

Hello chony,

Which audio interface do you have? Do you have installed the latest drivers? :slight_smile:

If you are getting kernel errors or kernel crashes on a brand new iMac…that’s pretty much 100% hardware related. That’s why Crohde is asking what kind of audio interface and driver version you’re running. Anything else externally attached?

Aloha,

Agreed with the above and
(not hit this too hard but)

IMHO
kernel panics on a brand new machine,

send it back.
{‘-’}

It’s a Mac…

Hm,mmm last Imac?? So is it in MacOS Lion? Perhaps is so early to migrate to Lion…

Aloha,
Lion/C6/iMac/MacBook all working fine here.

Still having probs with Yamaha n12 (waiting on updates)
Still waiting on SampleTank 3 (64 bit)
Ni stuff still weird. (can’t be sure why).
HTH
{‘-’}

I had a similar ASIO skipping problem w/Cubase 5x, but only when I ran a midi piano track with 13 existing 44kHz audio tracks. (First I suspected my LSI 21320, triple 15k HDD SCSI raid system to be the problem, since I had 8Gb RAM) I solved this problem by raising my Halion 3.x settings to 60s preload, 512 voice buffers and 384 kb size. In the device setup control panel I set the ASIO size to 1024 up from 352. I moved the midi track to the top of my arrangement page as per a Stienberg tip. I believe that moving the track to the top of the arrangement window made the biggest difference. Also, it is very interesting that you are using an n12. I am using an n8, so maybe some of this problem may be related to these devices???

Thanks all for sharing in this forum. I haven’t made the jump from 5x and 3x only, because I am at the finish line on a current project. I have been reading your comments in preparation of updating my Win XP dual opteron SCSI system to a MAC platform. Thanks again your comments are very helpful!!!