Weird Distortion

Hi, i recently updated to a new Mac and Soundcard.

Since then, i occationally expierience weird distortion and dropouts.

Any ideas how to solve this?

These are my driver settings:

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-29 um 08.55.41

hi - it’s always difficult to diagnose hardware/software problems, especially remotely - This doesn’t help but it looks like that ‘click’ is very regular - looks evenly spaced on the waveform.

Anyway - I think it’s bad news I’m afraid…

The 828mk2 was a good interface in the day - I had 2 - unfortunately that day was 16 years ago. The last Mac drivers are nearly 10 years old.

You don’t say what version of Mac OS you are using but I think that your not going to get good results from that interface - There is only a limited amount of things you can do on a mac to optimise it :frowning:

The clicks only appear all now and then.
On average i’d say in one take out of every recording session.

I’m using OSX 10.14 on a very fast Mac Mini.

My main suspect right now is USB. Because, for example, sometimes when i play music in itunes and a USB hard drive starts spinning i have short drop outs in the music.

Totally understood but It’s highly likely that your interface driver is 100% compatible with Mojave…it doesn’t matter how fast your Mac is.

I made a test today. I recorded a sinus wave with cubase, while activating/deactivating various harddrives and my iphone. I got drop outs every time.

Since i need Harddrives and other USB devices (Not neccissarily the iphone of course)

being connected to my computer, how can i resolve this?

Hi,
I hope you find out what’s causing it, but I would agree with the Doctor, your options are limited with old interfaces.

On my MacBookPro a while back I started off with a slightly old MOTU (Ultralite I think) unit because I have other MOTU gear and I like it. But it was glitching randomly and I couldn’t track it down, latest firmware / drivers etc. I tried two different units by other manufacturers (can’t remember which!) as well and they were the same (they were old units I had knocking around). I had to find a solution quick so I just purchased the latest Focusrite Scarlett (they have a good reputation for drivers) and that worked perfectly, upgraded to a Clarrett later for better sound and that also works perfectly.

That’s my experience anyway, but I suspect a new interface will work, it’s just the older ones which have trouble - and I have a dim recollection of seeing a post about the type of USB hardware implementation used in the interface but I could be inventing that one…

Mike.

Upon further testing (Various USB/Thunderbolt Slots) i came to the conclusion that it is indeed probably just the MOTU driver.

Dropouts do not appear, if i’m using the Mac internal Asio driver and Speaker.

I used to own a Scarlet sound card as well, and the drivers worked well. I just din’t like the sound. Motu cards sound a lot better imho.