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Does Async USB solve glitches/pops?

post #1 of 4
6/2/11 at 10:59pm
Thread Starter 

Backstory: I recently bought the HD600 headphones, which are great. I also bought the E7/E9 combo to use via USB. However, I am having tons of problems with glitches. I have modified just about every possible setting recommended on the internet for fixing usb audio glitches, and have improved it, but have run out of things to try--and frankly, my workstation is always going to be heavily loaded and USB might not be the right option for me.

 

I've been looking at the Musical Fidelity V-DAC, which also led me to the HRT Streamer II, which advertises async USB. My question: Does async USB have any hope of solving these glitches? People seem to love this DAC, and it's definitely at the right price. Otherwise, I'll probably go with something like the V-DAC and find a soundcard with spdif-out.

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post #2 of 4
6/3/11 at 1:41am

You can try to put a PCI USB card in Your PC. Usually the USB slots are in the same pipeline on the main board thus the interference in devices connected. If You put a PCI USB card in, it gets a different pipeline from the PCI.

These cards are cheap and easily found used.

 

And connect the DAC to that new USB port of course :-)

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post #3 of 4
6/4/11 at 3:15am
>Does async USB have any hope of solving these glitches?

Not if they're caused by DPC latency spike issues (you need to resolve those separately), or by your motherboard's usb controller problems (rare, but happens too)


>my workstation is always going to be heavily loaded and USB might not be the right option for me.

depends how heavy the I/O and CPU load is and whether you've set windows to favour background services or programs, I think.
Edited by svyr - 6/4/11 at 3:18am
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post #4 of 4
6/4/11 at 8:18pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by svyr View Post

>Does async USB have any hope of solving these glitches?

Not if they're caused by DPC latency spike issues (you need to resolve those separately), or by your motherboard's usb controller problems (rare, but happens too)


>my workstation is always going to be heavily loaded and USB might not be the right option for me.

depends how heavy the I/O and CPU load is and whether you've set windows to favour background services or programs, I think.



I ran the typical DPC latency checker that is linked to everywhere and saw a consistent average of 120ms, occasional spikes to 300ms, never saw it higher than that.

 

The pops do seem correlated with heavy CPU activity, but I've got dual 4-core xeon processors, each with hyperthreading (which I also tried disabling). I've tried changing it to favor background activity, and it may have had a positive effect, but hard to tell.

 

I'm going to try the PCI USB card on Monday and see if that resolves it.

 

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