Mbox: digital noise with Airport Card

[gdew]

I am having terrible troubles with my airport card in my G3 iBook interfering and completely destroying the signal going through my Mbox. I don't mean there is some noise on the signal, the entire signal becomes garbled mess of digital noise. It is extremely loud and coarse.

It occurs every time when I print and often when I am sending and recieving data from the internet through my airport card. I have run some basic tests to try to isolate the problem. I have printed USB and ethernet and used the internet over ethernet without any problems. I have wrapped the Mbox with foil to see if it is airbourne interference from the card, but it makes no difference.

It seems to me that it is a conflict between the airport card and Mbox inside my computer and data being transmitted through the airport card gets routed into my Mbox as well.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Does anyone know a fix to remove it?

I would appreciate any help.

Also, I ould like to know if the digital noise could damage my speakers. As I said it is extremely loud and coarse, and although my speakers don't distort, that pounding of on/off signals at what is presumably at full line level couldn't be doing them any good.

Thanks.

[Phil71]

turn airport off

[gdew]

That doesn't help.

The whole point is I want to be able to use my Mbox in conjection with my Airport card without them getting in each others way.

[Bixby]

Have you tried a different (better) USB cable and or hub?

It's my experience that the supplied cable is very low quality, and making these changes seem to have solved some other "hearing noises" issues for many.

Good luck!

[gdew]

Yeah, I have tried a few different cables and a hub.

This isn't a problem a foreign signal being overlayed on top of the audio and masking it, the entire signal breaks apart into noise. There is no audio, just this hideous rasping sound. I have also noticed that my Mbox pops and resets itself after a few seconds of this noise input.

I am pretty sure that the signal is effected before it leaves my computer.

Thanks for the help though.

[gdew]

Just a few further observations...

The issue only occurs when I am sending data out of my computer (uploading) to the airport receiver. (It seems)

The the issue occurs my CPU activity goes completely crazy, but I haven't found any clear patterns in that activity yet. Wierd things happen like iTunes starts consuming 90% of my CPU once the Mbox has failed (stopped making any noise altogther, usually after a pop and the light resetting.)

When I tried to replicate the problem in Pro Tools, which I succeeded in doing, I received the error -9134 and a message saying the CPU usage is holding off USB audio. This would suggest my computer doesn't have enough power to run audio to the Mbox while doing anything else, but simply copying a file over my local wireless network is enough to cause the problem.

My buffer is set to 1024 at the moment.

[Bixby]

I'd give Digi a call on this one, definitely.

What system (iBook and PT) are you using?