sudden white noise

[roartrax]

Here's the situation...I'm contentedly tweaking away on a project I've been heavily into for an hour or two ,then suddenly at the tap of the return key or any other insignificant (on cpu usage) move,I get a blast of white noise,like someone just changed the channel to a "no channel " channel on the telly! The first time this happened I very nearly crapped myself! So suspecting some kind of over somewhere,I changed the DAE settings from default to the next setting up, which remedied the problem..for a while...next time it happened I changed the setting up again ,which remedied the situation again for a while...most recently I discovered it doesn't seem to matter ,up or down ,just changing the DAE setting work's ,for a while...well now I fear if I don't adress this strange (to me) behaviour of my otherwise well behaved setup,I will soon be incurring irepairable hearing damage! my setup is ;an mbox LE 6.9.2/imac 2ghz powerpc g5/1gb ram OSX any help from anyone would be much appreciated by me ,and my ears,cheers Rory.

[andyxj6]

did you resolve your noise problem? I have had the same thing happen recently ... using an 002 rack with a Dell laptop, 2Gb RAM ... been getting h/w buffer -6086 erros even though i have tons of resources and have buffers set to the max.

but upon playback ,after working for a while, with the monitors and headphones at modest volume ...a suddne blast of white noise happens ... I actually see the the right channel volume explode on the keyboard stereo track.

This caused temporary ringing in the ears of a vocalist. Really ticked off about this.

I also used the same rack on Toshiba machine ... after a while get the same issue.


andyxj6

[countach74]

my friend's got the same problem. i've been keeping my eyes open for topics like this on the board, and whenever they come up, it seems that no one has an answer...

[brianmc]

I have experienced the same exact problem. I tried updating the firmware, but my Mbox System Preferences says "Unable to connect to Mbox". QT and other applications use the Mbox just fine, even ProTools (7.1), but I cannot update the firmware or it says my Mbox will be rendered useless! This might not be the problem, but I have tried every trick I know to make to go away forever.

This is very unsettling when deadlines approach, let alone the potencial hearing loss!

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

[gunnarg]

I've had the same problem with my MBox 1 for a while now, but it never seemed consistent. Sometimes I'd be static-free for minutes, hours, or for a whole session. I'd close and restart and even then sometimes get it right away. Lately I've been disabling the AirPort wireless card on my Power Mac G5 before I start using PTLE and haven't had ANY static since doing that. Not sure if it's actually related in any way, but I've been having good luck so far.

I'm glad this has been working for me as I've been working on some vocal recordings and would be beyond angry if this kept happening. It's extremely loud and jarring.

If I do need the distraction of surfing the net while working in PTLE, I just have my MBP sitting on the desk next to me.

[roartrax]

Thanx for your response,
I have just synchronistically,before logging on just now, turned off my airport & bluetooth ports after reading the recomendations stated in the general trouble shooting section yesterday, posted by Digitechsupt (making sure I've tried the obvious solutions first is probably a good idea!),sorry guys... it would be great if this works,though I would be very interested to know the mechanics of this problem in detail ,but for now I'll be working one handed for a while the other has all fingers crossed!

[roartrax]

A little early to tell just yet,but Gunnarg may be stearing in the right direction...stay tuned to this thread I suspect we may not be alone...

[andyxj6]

I think you are right ... I don't think we're alone here. I'm really choked about it. A singer I'm working with won't come back into my studio because her ears hurt so bad when this happened on friday. I have my own small studio but also work as a trainee in a major commercial studio. I asked the head engineer about this and he thinks it's something to do with P/Tools and the clock. I often use the ADAT clock in an external device ... they use a totally separate clock in that studio.

I also wrote a note to Digi sales admin dept. asking to speak to someone about this ... this is beyond a technical support issue when you're restrained because of fear of hearing loss.

I'll let you know what they say, if anything.

andyxj6

[pmaudio]

Hi All,

For what it is worth

The white noise from my past experiences have come from a couple of things in the past and has almost aways plagued me.

in OS 9 it was caused by a Waves plugin isssue that was fixed.
In OS X same thing and was fixed for a while but now it seems to get once and while. I don't track or mix as much as I used too these days.

I have noticed this though. It seems to be not white noise (although that is what it sounds like) It is more a full amplutude signal of what you were playing back. Like over clipping only in an extreme way. ????

I don't remeber exactly what I was doing when I discovered this but if you have a Limiter on your master output set to an extreme rate you will find when the burst happens that it is not so much white noise but very highly distorted levels of what it was that is playing back.
I have also noticed it is only affecting the output of the MBox not the internal mixing of the computer.
I was trying to bounce a track and the noise kept hitting me during the bounce until I thought ok Stupid thing, lets see what happens to the wave form if I let it complete the bounce. so I turned down the volume and at a very low level I could hear the pulses of the beat of my mix.

The Bounce perfectly fine.
A recomendation if you are currently having this problem.
While tracking, put a limiter on their mix output track that is set to kill the level of anything really blastedly loud. It may take a bit of adjustment to get it right.
While mixing, keep a limiter set the same way to keep you from blowing up your monitors and scaring the crap out of your 4 month old daughter sitting on your knee listening to you mix her mommy singging a lullaby, and then scream her face off for 1/2 an hour afterwards cause she was so frighted. (she is 16 months old now and seems to really like loud thunder and laughs heartily when I sneak up behind her and go BOOO!) So It hopefully did not cause her any permanent damage.

I would prefer things to get fixed and stay fixed but such is life that work arounds are occasionally required.

I hope this will help a few people.

Paddio

[roartrax]

Here's the latest ...unfortunately after turning off bluetooth&airport I got two blasts in the space of about 4 hours,then I recieved an email from Digi Supt,suggesting a firmware update(which I have done,and so far,after a few hours of mixing,no blasts!! firmware updates so far for my setup are LE6.9-6.9.2-6.9.2cs4.at the risk of stating the obvious,each update relys on the previous update being installed to be successful,(unless I'm mistaken)this worked for me!
Looks like the head engineer gets the prize(does he like smoked eels?) for closest to the mark as to just what the problem may be, i.e a clocking anomaly as,apart from reference to core audio in the update pdf Digi also suggested in the email, that any device connected to the mbox via spdif needed to have the clock source checked as a possible cause of this kind of blast of noise,hope this helps Rory.P.s Thanx Paddio for the limiter tip,always good to have a safety net, if you can find one that works...why didn't I think of that !