Mac Pro 6,1 DVS -> MTRX Studio went all flaky

[remainanon]

Hey gang -

Recent acquisition of a MTRX Studio had quite a honeymoon, for me anyway. I think it sounds great, and I have been enjoying using Dante to pipe the Mac system audio in, and a talkback mic on the MTRX preamp back to the Mac.

Worked flawlessly. Until Friday.

Now, both directions, I have brutal dropouts, clicks, noises, basically an un-synced connection.

Looking in Dante Controller, I can check the clock status, and depending on the moment, any or both of the devices (Mac Pro and MTRX) can have green sync lights or red. I have not yet worked out what changes the state of these things, but whatever color they are, the current streams either direction are still garbage. I have the general idea how to make the clocking work, and have tried a bunch of reconfigurations of settings in DADman and Controller, and nothing has had any effect at all –*either on the bad stream sound or the little "lights" in the software.

I have switched out Enet cables, traded the Enet bridge. I have an S3 on the other enet port on the Mac, so unless I get a TB-Enet bridge I can't try that.

I might have multiple bad Enet bridges, but the odd thing is I had the system up and running for nearly a month, full-on project work, and the Dante connection was rock-solid. Never wavered. Now, it's never good.

Any idears?
JW

[creativecontrol]

Greetings,

A few things. What other devices besides MTRX Studio and Dante Virtual Soundcard are connected to your Dante Network? Have you updated MTRX Studio firmware to current (1.0.3.2) and are you running DADman v 5.4.4.2? It would be helpful to see what your Clock Status tab in Dante Controller looks like. macOS version?


best,


Jeff

[fiddlefro]

I know this is an old thread, but did you ever find a resolution for this? I'm having a similar problem and it's driving me crazy!

[AIMM]

If you're using the Mac Pro's built-in ethernet for DVS, that could possibly be the culprit. Per Audinate's suggestion, one should use a USB or any other type of external ethernet interface for DVS. It has something to do with a complication of the network stack used by most all of Apple's built-in ethernet interfaces. In addition to that, sometimes reducing the number of DVS I/O channels and/or upping the DVS latency settings can have a positive effect. I've always found DVS to be glitchy even when things are configured properly, so ultimately I opted for the Audinate USB Dante Module, which is much more reliable (but only 2-channel). For me, the USB module always seems to default to 16-bit in AMS upon initial connection, so be sure to manually switch it to 24-bit if you're ever using one. Old thread indeed, but hopefully this helps.

[fiddlefro]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Ultimately (like many others on this forum it seems) I’ve ditched DVS. It’s so unstable and Audinate doesn’t seem to be overly invested in fixing it. I tried external Ethernet adapters, every network setup posssible, high latency values.
Ultimately I used an old USB interface to route audio out of the Mac, and then back in via analog channels. It’s a ridiculous solution but it comes with one advantage - because I’m converting to analog and back to digital, there’s no need to match sample rates with the rest of my DANTE network or worry about clock sync.
All the best!

[originalscottyg]

I've been using DVS from my Mac Studio into my MTRX Studio (mostly) successfully. And my colleague uses it from his Trashcan Mac Pro into his MTRX Studio. Things are mostly fine, but anytime there's heavy network traffic, e.g. I'm downloading or uploading large files, my latency goes crazy. I am running a converged network, and don't have the right switches in the right places, no QoS or IGMP, etc. But the biggest drag is switching sample rates. DVS makes that a huge PITA. We both plan to add the Thunderbolt 3 card soon and ditch DVS.