performance breakdown digi 002 rack / macos x

[seam]

hello...

we have a serious problem here at our studio : we have an iMac G4/800 with Mac OS 10.3.8 and a Digi 002 Rack. each time the DigiDesign Core Audio driver comes up, the system performance breaks down as if you were working on a G3/300 or such. This is independant of the application. For example, in BIAS Peak it takes 100 or 200 ms between pressing the space bar and transport actually starting. you really "wait" for menu bar to open etc. When we have iTunes running and playing through Digi 002, you can see the web browser "building up" tables, no joke. The activity monitor shows c. 20% CPU load for the driver if no audio is playing (it rises when audio is playing). In Cycling'74 Max/MSP it's practically impossible to work.

We have tried to connect other audio interfaces, for example a Motu 828 MkI and a Metric Halo Mobile I/O, both of which are firewire interfaces. Their performance is absolutely sweet ... The Digi 002 doesn't show any signs of strange behaviour. We exchanged the firewire cord, no success. We were hoping on each update of the drivers that this would fix the problem, but it didn't (installed PT LE 6.9 / CoreAudio 6.9 today; the problem was already there with an older MacOS, like 10.3.5 or so).

Is there anything we can do or should the Digi 002 be send back? (it was bought last year in germany, there's is two year warranty as far as i know). Has anyone else experienced this behaviour?. Of course I don't know for sure, but this looks like a hardware problem to me?

Thanks for your help.

Best,
Hanns Holger Rutz
Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT Weimar
Studio für Elektroakustische Musik

[DigiTechSupt]

Have you tried the 'General Troubleshooting' suggestions in the sticky at the top of this forum? If not, start there, specifically the areas on trashing prefs and databases.