My USB Audio Interface is Caning My CPU/ASIO performance meter

[ImpactProducer]

I just got my Audio Interface home, - (Lexicon Ionix U22) - Within Half an hour, - I was gutted.

First I was dissapointed with the Asio Drivers, I could not select an Exact Buffer setting in Samples, there were just Preset setings where the buffers had been set for me, ,ie,- Slow, Medium, Fast ,Extra fast, it was cool if i was Recording ie, Low input Latencys, But for playing my Keyboard, The Output Latencys were Higher than what I could get with the Standard , ASIO DX full duplex Drivers, that came with Nuendo,

My Second Problem is that The Divers or the Interface seemed to be very unstable, - My CPU/ASIO , Perfomance, meter in Nuendo was all over the place, even when just idle, it was much higher than it was with the standard ASIO driver mentioned above, With 1, instance of Massive Loaded up ,On My favorite patch, it was nearly , 3/4 full,

very annoying,
This has scared me away from audio interfaces,
Do all specific ASIO drivers for Interfaces use a large amount of Processing Power,
Is it coz My PC is Rubbish,

Intel CELERON D , 2.8 ghz
1 gb ram,

Thankfully -- Digital Village -- Let me return it,

Im now thinking of buying a PCI , M audio , Delta or AudioFile,

I really Dont want to be Using up My Valuble PROCESSING Power running My Interface , I just want 24 bit Sound, and Low output Latency for playing my Keyboard,

any Sugesstions would be grately Appreciated,,

Paul

[terminal3]

I don't really know much about PCs anymore but I do know that the first port of call when the ASIO driver is giving you trouble is to try the free Asio4All driver...

http://www.asio4all.com/

Install that and give it a go and see what happens...

[ecc83]

Morning Paul.
Don't let a bad experience put you off external AI's*. I for instance run a Fast track pro into an old HP laptop, 850mHz, 512ram! That will run 2 tracks, 24bits 44.1kHz all day no sweat. That's about ALL it can do! No plugins, reverb or suchwhich but it shows that even a stupidly low pc spec' can be useful.

2.8G and 1G ram is a lightweight by todays standards I agree but you should be able to run quite a bit of kit with that if it is setup properly. Do go to www.soundonsound.com and sign up to their forum and find the XPMusic optimizations. VERY important to do these.

Pci is the way to go and I would stick with M-Audio. They are generally recognised as having THE most solid and fastest drivers on the planet. Emu cards are excellent but I read their latency cannot get down to M's levels.

AP 2496 or AP192 if you want slightly better converters (but you will never tell, IMHO!) and balanced I/O.

*This is TOTALLY unsubstantiated but I have heard whispers of Lexicon drivers not being top hole before.

Rock on,
Dave.

[JAYDMF]

Originally Posted by ecc83

Morning Paul.
Don't let a bad experience put you off external AI's*. I for instance run a Fast track pro into an old HP laptop, 850mHz, 512ram! That will run 2 tracks, 24bits 44.1kHz all day no sweat. That's about ALL it can do! No plugins, reverb or suchwhich but it shows that even a stupidly low pc spec' can be useful.

2.8G and 1G ram is a lightweight by todays standards I agree but you should be able to run quite a bit of kit with that if it is setup properly. Do go to www.soundonsound.com and sign up to their forum and find the XPMusic optimizations. VERY important to do these.

Pci is the way to go and I would stick with M-Audio. They are generally recognised as having THE most solid and fastest drivers on the planet. Emu cards are excellent but I read their latency cannot get down to M's levels.

AP 2496 or AP192 if you want slightly better converters (but you will never tell, IMHO!) and balanced I/O.

*This is TOTALLY unsubstantiated but I have heard whispers of Lexicon drivers not being top hole before.

Rock on,
Dave.

Yeah your not wrong lexicons drivers havent exactly had great ratings in the past but i think theyre working on it these days. Make sure you've not got lots of USB devices all sharing off the same bus. ie not everything is directly on the mobos IO plate. Ive managed to overload mine before now and even tho its overloaded and technically knocked off the cause of the overload (in my case running, mouse, keyboard, x-station, audio box and cubase dongle from the IO plate) it still drags the system down. Your front ports and any ports situated in one of the PCI slots will be on a seperate buss so if you get the same thing again just change the heavy duty stuff over to different ports.

As Dave mentioned. PCI is a solid way of working but id advise against it if you have things like wireless cards, modems, ethernet cards or anything else plugged into PCI as the PCI bus can only run as fast as the slowest device connected to it. Also if it is an older machine with a cheaper mobo you might find you get IRQ sharing problems that can either cause the card to function incorrectly when recording/playing back (usually sounds like lots of jitter and stuttering) or not at all.