Mbox Playback Noise

[instro001]

As a lot of you know already.. a lot of us are having issues of noise coming out of the mbox during playback.. recently I saw a post which explains a solution, which is to buy a berklin usb hub to get ride of the sound.. I decided to purchase a Berklin USB 2.0 hub at Best Buy and as a result it removed the noise.. But here's the problem.. when attempting to playback or record at a buffer rate of 128 samples.. the playback is messed up .. full of static.. and i'm getting drop outs.. any suggestions?

[madrock]

i plugged my 002R into my old imac the other day and got the same noise. used a filtered firewire cable and it went away.

dunno if the same will work for USB but sure sounds like a lot less $$$ and hassle to me if it does!

also, as an aside, i repaired a friend's mbox system that contains a no-name mobo a few months ago. USB was as noisy as hell but on my system (Asus board, Zalman PSU) quiet as a mouse...

[instro001]

thanks for the suggestions madrock.. i also notice that this whole mbox noise is a power issue since the external powered usb hub killed the noise. what i'm also getting at is maybe my pc needs a higher power supply in order to remove the noise.. how much watts is your pc's power supply?

[madrock]

400 watts i think. it's not just a matter of power but also quality of power. a lot of cheaper PSU's suffer from high ripple and instability which can end up on the USB (and everywhere else for that matter). switching power supplies are also heavily affected by the impedance and inductance presented by the load. something which Zalman, Thermaltake and Antec claim to have compensatory factors in place for.

hard drives can also create a lot of noise on the +12 and +5 volt rails but if the motherboard has sufficient power conditioning this shouldn't be to much of an issue.

personally, i'd try one of those USB cables with an in-line filter (just like the one on microsoft usb mouse cables) before anything as brash as the power supply. chances are you'd change it and notice little to no difference and the cable cost's a fraction of the price.

[instro001]

hmmm thanks once again madrock.. i'ma look into a different usb cable ..

[instro001]

i bought the higher quality usb cable recently and still there's noise.. so it all comes down to two things.. either buy a bigger power supply.. or buy a griffin usb audio hub which is dedicated to usb audio devices..