ADC/LLM and the avid mbox pro

[collinsylex]

I picked up the avid mbox pro a few weeks ago and it has been a mixed bag of joy and pain with pro tools 9.0.1 (and i had the same issues in 9.0.0). When everything is working, its great! I am having some issues that drive me a bit crazy though.

My BIGGEST issue so far has been the track alignment of my recordings. I really don't trust that pro tools will get it right from session to session... Things will line up under perfect conditions (as in every component connected having been power cycled that day and started in the correct order, and basically no other audio applications ever opened- just gone straight to pro tools and got to work..)

if I have my laptop running with the mbox pro for 2 or 3 days without power cycling everything, pro tools will appear happy enough (playing back yesterdays sessions, no problem!) BUT if i record new audio, its way out sync. i can do some testing and figure out how much to nudge so its not the end of the world... but what a vibekiller!

yesterday it happened again... and i had time to break it down a bit and get scientific about it...


i recorded some bass guitar on a session and it was out of whack! right away, i muted the bass, inserted a new track and squeezed my headphones to a mic i had hooked up... the session at 120 bpm was just under a 16th note delayed in the recorded audio taken from the headphones. I saved the session and shut down pro tools. i powered off the mbox and let it chill for 20 seconds, after it initialized again i went back into pro tools and did the same process with the headphones. This time it was about half of a 16th note delayed, visually could see an improvement from the first try but still not usable in my music!
At this point i power cycled everything (mbox,macbookpro, hard drive, MC Control and all that...) Once the whole system seemed ready i started up pro tools and went back to the same session. Hit play, no music plays, instead, up pops a CLOCK ERROR! (i have only analog stuff hooked into the mbox, no spdif or wordclock stuff connected) I hit play a few more times and the same error happened. (this is the first time ive seen that error pop up..)
Again, i quit pro tools and power cycled the mbox pro... Started up protools again and went back for the headphone to mic test... This time, everything lined up PERFECTLY.

So for that, i don't know what to blame... ADC??? perhaps an internal Mbox clocking issue? very strange.

I was excited about the mbox pro because i figured with Avid Hardware i can't go too far wrong using pro-tools... so far, its been rather touchy~! funny thing is, the other night i was using the laptop at home just on built in audio... pro tools was ROCK SOLID. I had itunes playing a song at the same time as pro tools, protools really didn't care! with my mbox pro connected, opening itunes causes disaster lol

So i can get it to work, which is great!, but the crappy part is that i am afraid to mess it up once working, So that means i don't want to burn cds in itunes or even check a bounce for fear that the next time i open pro tools its gonna be recording out of time!

If i accidentally open itunes while pro tools is open, the next time i hit play i get a buffer error and have to restart pro tools... which means again i test the system with the headphone trick to make sure i am not gonna have audio out of whack, usually it comes back correctly, but some times its a disaster!

ADC is always enabled, and I usually have LLM enabled (i have no need to turn it off) as it works SO GOOD with the mbox pro control pannel... I LOVE the way protools and mbox pro are designed to work together, as its exactly what i wanted for my pro tools rig. ( i wanted the same amount of control i have in every other daw using apogee maestro or saffire mixcontrol software and the ability to turn off monitoring thru the DAW instead of the mute,unmute,mute,unmute juggling game in pro tools with 3rd party devices.. )


Anyone else in a similar boat?


System Details
2.4Ghz Dual Core Macbook Pro (13inch)
snow leopard up to date
4 Gigs Ram
Protools 9
Avid Mbox Pro
Apogee Duet
Apogee One
1TB G-Technology FW800 Hard Drive

[collinsylex]

today the second headphone of the mbox pro became useless... it went mute, then did some really loud noize stuff after a reboot and even more noize on the next reboot.. so with all the flakey performance and now the headphone issue, i took it back to grab a fresh unit (which they no longer had in stock).. I ended up going with a different 3rd party card, which is turning out to be excellent! (my whole system is much happier)

So this is now a non issue for me