UR22C - Tuned my computer and now it sounds great

Steinberg Hardware UR-C Series
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I figured I’d let everyone know what I did to get the UR22C sounding amazing.

I have a regular Asus Vivobook with an i5-1335U. Not the slowest chip, but not the fastest either. The built-in Realtek audio chip deals out an impossible 8.4ms output latency.

When I first plugged it in, of course, I tried to get the latency set very low. It sounded awful with substantial glitches. I could tell I was hitting a drum pad and the timing was fantastic with sub 3ms RTL, but it absolutely couldn’t be played live and certainly was not what I wanted to hear while tapping in music.

I found a guide online that has many ways to tune your computer for audio - not going to plug that specific website - but there were many websites like it.

I ended up turning off the Intel hyper-threading in the BIOS, turning off Anti-Virus, optimizing Windows for background applications, turning off all the eye candy of Windows 11 except for the font enhancements. I already had the paging file turned off.

I also needed to reboot fully whenever I wanted to use the UR22C. Coming out of standby, the latency was bad from the unit. Apparently, the drivers don’t revive properly from standby. Rebooted and that fixed it; of course, turn off the antivirus again.

Now, I get some slight pops when at 48KHz and 32 samples with standard mode. However, when I kick it up to 192KHz and 128 samples and standard mode, all glitches go away and it sounds great. The output latency is 2.9 ms and input is 1.9. This is definitely acceptable for me.

I’m sure I could tune the laptop further, and I will in the future, for now this is working. I’ll probably go after the multitude of services running in the background with a script or something. Next I’ll see about shutting off Windows Defender somehow (Windows denies shutting it down). With those further tweaks, I’ll shoot for switching it to Low-Latency mode and getting it sounding good with an RTL sub 3ms.

All that said, I hope this information helps anyone that is dealing with glitchy sound.

Best,
C

1 Like
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Kudo for your contribution.
Hope many people will read it as it’s a common problem and proves not everyone needs a $2000 computer to get great sound in simple applications, if done right.

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Here’s an update on further tuning I’ve done to squeeze perfection out of my average laptop.

Per the last post, things sounded pretty good and the latency was decent. But even with some pretty decent tuning, I’d still get pops here and there and an occasional zap sound. There was more to do.

The Intel processor I have is an i5-1335U. It has 2 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores. Per my research, it’s the efficiency cores that are bad for gaming. I suspected this was also true for music.

My BIOS on the Asus Vivobook 17 doesn’t permit turning off the E cores like other higher-level computers. I stumbled across some websites where people had success in fixing gaming problems by using MSCONFIG to reduce the number of processor threads down to the number of P-Cores they have.

Per my previous post on this thread, I had already turned off Intel’s hyperthreading, and this was a boost in performance for audio. (If I had not done this, the two P-Cores would be seen as 4 cores by the operating system)

With MSCONFIG, I reduced the number of processors down to 2 (exact number of P-Cores). I rebooted and turned off antivirus. Checked Task Manager; 2 processors.

I fired up Ableton and the UR22C. Boom! No zaps and pops at all.

Even on the Ableton demo set, which the laptop struggled through, plays perfectly now.

I took it further. I set the UR22C to “Low Latency Mode” and the lowest buffer size.

I tried 44,100 and 192,000KHz with the lowest buffers for each. It sounds perfect no matter what I do. And the Round Trip Latency (RTL) is less than 3ms at 192,000KHz.

I’m actually shocked that this worked. Disabling the E-Cores did the trick. Intel has a bit more work to do for the people doing audio. Until then, I’m happy we can tweak these things.

I hope this helps others reading this.

As a note, I want to make sure others avoid trouble with disabling cores. Some people apparently set their MSCONFIG for more cores than are in the system, and then the system didn’t boot. Don’t be silly and understand your processor before you tweak things like this. …and make sure you have jotted down the commands you need to run in Windows Recovery mode if your computer won’t boot and you need to reset it. It’s easy to reset, but you need to have the commands noted.

Best, C