PTLE 7.1.1 Core Audio driver problem?

[Clinton Heider]

Hi,

I am running PTLE with an Mbox, Intel Minimac, OSX 10.4.7 and attempting to use the Digidesign core audio drivers with Reason 3.0.5 (it is the universal binary version of Reason). Reason seems to behave fine with the native audio card, but bass response is distorting badly on a few tracks when played back through the Digidesign core audio driver. I also have noticed that performance is slower with the digidesign driver: for example, if I scroll or resize the sequencer pane in Reason, the audio starts chopping up. This is not the case when played through the built-in audio. I have the HW Buffer Size set to 1024 and the sample rate is 44.1 khz.

I did not notice the distortion problem when playing the same Reason track as a plug-in through the Protools software, which indicates to me that the Core Audio driver is at issue.

I saw some information about distortion being caused by certain buffer sizes in the Readme for the driver, but none of the conditions mentioned there apply to my configuration.

Does anyone out there have a similar experience on similar hardware? Pretty much everything else works OK, so I do not suspect any hardware problems. Is Digidesign planning improvements to the performance of the core audio driver for Intel based macs? I did not have these issues on my G4 running older/native versions of Protools and Reason.

Thanks!