Unstable Firewire interface!

[crystaljuggler]

Hi everyone - I'd actually thought I'd be answering questions around here, but I seem to be having problems of my own.

I've had a snazzy new Allen & Heath ZED R16 for a while, and I haven't really had it working properly attached to my snazzy new home-built PC since I got it. I'm using Cubase Studio 4, and I've found that after a new clean boot the interface works fine for a while, and then kind of stops working at odd intervals but will work again if I start and stop playback or mess about with sample rates to get it to reset itself, and then stops working at all. This happens under XP and under a sort of hacked installation of the not-digitally-signed drivers under Vista 64 (under which it seems to lock and unlock its sync quite randomly, but that's not really surprising), using ASIO drivers. Things like Amplitube 2 only work for a while before it falls off, but Battery 3 seems to be fine, though I haven't tested it extensively recently. Today Cubase told me it was having trouble recording a single track, complaining that I had too many tracks recording at once. I've changed motherboards to see if that was the problem, and it hasn't made an appreciable difference.

The weird thing is that I recently took it down to a barn and hooked it up to an old PC, a Pentium 4 with 700MB of memory and a cheap Firewire card, and laid down several hours of drum recordings across eight channels at once without missing a beat. So - does anyone have any idea why this sort of behaviour might be happening? Any Windows Updates that kill Firewire interfaces? Known issues with Nvidia motherboards? Do I have too much memory? Dicky networking card? I really have no experience with Firewire interfaces at all, so any ideas are appreciated. Full specs of the PC are below :

EVGA 780i SLI motherboard
Pentium Q6600 Quad-core 2400MHz
8GB Corsair XMS memory
1x Seagate 160GB hard drive for the OS
3x Samsung 1TB drives that were in RAID5, now running individually, for storing the data
Sitecom PCI Wireless-N networking card

As I've said, I appreciate any ideas, as I'm trying to get some demos recorded for the band and I'm only able to work half an hour at a time at seemingly random intervals, and it's, well, frustrating to say the least!

[Electriclight]

It looks like you are not the first:

ZED-R16 Firewire dropout. Loss of Firewire connection. - Powered By Kayako SupportSuite

ZED-R16 Firewire dropout. Loss of Firewire connection.
SolutionFirewire dropout. Lost Firewire connection.
If your ZED-R16 loses connection via firewire after a period of time, please contact your supplier, or our distributor for your country[list of international distributors on website].
Be prepared to give the full serial number of your ZED-R16. Your supplier/distributor will contact Allen & Heath UK Technical Support to confirm what action is required.



Article DetailsArticle ID: 38Created On: 27 Nov 2008 03:44 PM

[crystaljuggler]

Thanks for that! Nice to know I'm not entirely alone, which is a problem with being an early adopter. I have a vague idea that overheating of the motherboard could be another related issue, but I'll get in touch with Allen and Heath and see what's up.

[crystaljuggler]

Just in case anyone ele has had a problem with this, I may as well share the solution. After swapping motherboards, changing operating systems, and generally tearing my hair out, I worked out that it was my wireless network card causing hassles. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to come up often in discussions about Firewire interfaces, so I didn't suspect it.

In any case, I now disable the driver for the network card while I'm using the computer for audio, and it works absolutely flawlessly. Hope that helps someone, some day!

[Audio~Geek]

ha that's what I was going to suggest, turn off wireless networking.

Run all your sessions off one of the spare drives, use another for sample libraries if you use them.

RAID is good but not for audio work.

[crystaljuggler]

I found RAID5 worked fine for me initially. I set up three 1TB drives in a RAID5 array, the performance was brilliant, and when one of the drives failed, I just took it out and sent it away for replacement while the other two carried on regardless. Abaolutely what the technology was designed for. What I didn't count on was when I reinstalled Vista and suddenly everything went haywire, the array split itself into two, the Nvidia controller wouldn't recognise the drives in the various configurations I tried, and fairly obviously I lacked a spare 2TB drive to mirror the remaining data to.

It's all a learning curve. When I get it all working like the brochure says it should, I'll let you know.

-=Matte=-