Popping from USB interference?

[Spork829]

Hi everyone,

 

I just built a new Ryzen system and everything's working great, except it doesn't seem to be playing nice with my USB audio interface (Tascam US-1200).

 

I'm hearing occasional pops and clicks through my headphones using the interface. I tried every USB port, lowered the buffer size, reinstalled the driver, none it seemed to help. It appears to be pretty random; I don't think it's happening any more when the system's under load. The interface never did this with the laptop I was using previously. Is it just interference over USB? Would the solution be a USB card with its own controller?

 

Thanks guys!

[The Flying Sloth]

Increasing the buffer size is a possible fix, not lowering, as is lowering the sample rate to 44.1khz. 

 

If neither of those steps help it is possible (though extremely unlikely) that you're saturating the USB controller, if that's the case a dedicated card may help.

[Spork829]

7 minutes ago, The Flying Sloth said:

Increasing the buffer size is a possible fix, not lowering, as is lowering the sample rate to 44.1khz. 

 

If neither of those steps help it is possible (though extremely unlikely) that you're saturating the USB controller, if that's the case a dedicated card may help.

 

Yeah that's what I meant, buffer size was set to max, or "highest latency" as my interface calls it. Sample rate is currently at 44.1, would it be worth lowering it more? I only have a mouse, keyboard and mic plugged in besides the interface so I doubt I'm saturating the controller. What else could it be? Could this suggest something faulty with the new mb?

[The Flying Sloth]

I can't say I'm familiar with Tascam interfaces beyond the knowledge that they do indeed manufacture interfaces so I'm not the best person to comment on their driver stability but this certainly sounds like something is borked, whether that's a windows update, the interface itself or your motherboard I can't say really. Try moving it to a different USB port, perhaps even move the keyboard and mouse to USB 3 so the interface has the USB 2 channel to itself, to see if it's just a controller bottleneck, other than that I'm not confident I can help.

[Spork829]

3 hours ago, The Flying Sloth said:

I can't say I'm familiar with Tascam interfaces beyond the knowledge that they do indeed manufacture interfaces so I'm not the best person to comment on their driver stability but this certainly sounds like something is borked, whether that's a windows update, the interface itself or your motherboard I can't say really. Try moving it to a different USB port, perhaps even move the keyboard and mouse to USB 3 so the interface has the USB 2 channel to itself, to see if it's just a controller bottleneck, other than that I'm not confident I can help.

Yeah I've had more than a few issues with the driver and did have a recent windows update, so that sounds likely. And it's an old interface I bought used, meaning it doesn't get driver updates anymore and that the unit itself might just be going, hard to say. I think I'll probably want to borrow another USB audio device from someone and see how that works. Thanks for your help!

[Spork829]

On 6/18/2020 at 6:42 PM, The Flying Sloth said:

I can't say I'm familiar with Tascam interfaces beyond the knowledge that they do indeed manufacture interfaces so I'm not the best person to comment on their driver stability but this certainly sounds like something is borked, whether that's a windows update, the interface itself or your motherboard I can't say really. Try moving it to a different USB port, perhaps even move the keyboard and mouse to USB 3 so the interface has the USB 2 channel to itself, to see if it's just a controller bottleneck, other than that I'm not confident I can help.

In case you're interested in an update, I think I've narrowed the problem down to Windows. Looks like it's a DPC latency issue caused by the DirectX kernel and other Windows stuff, at least according to this neat little utility I found. Working on a solution now, might just have to reinstall Windows.