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Alesis IO-2 not obviously bad
This is a follow-up to some messages I posted here several months ago.
I was trying to get an Alesis IO|2 to work reliably with a two-year-old Toshiba laptop, but it was skipping samples even with simple 44.1 kHz two-channel live recording. This was easy enough to see if I fed in a 300 Hz sine wave and recorded it--the resulting waveform had jagged glitches in it every 10 seconds or so. Recently I upgraded the RAM on the laptop from 256 MB to 512 MB and at the same time, upgraded its hard drive from a 4500 rpm model to a 5400 rpm model. The average access time of the new drive is only around 20% lower than the old one, but it has a much larger RAM buffer (8 MB). Somewhere in all of this, the computer's performance apparently reached the point at which there are no more glitches in the recorded waveforms at 44.1 kHz--at least I haven't seen any so far in some brief tests, which used to be enough to reveal the problem. (Next I intend to record a long stretch of tone and write a program to scan the resulting WAV file for glitches, since examining all the waveforms visually is tiresome.) What this tells me is that manufacturers' statements about the "minimum hardware requirements" may need to be taken with a considerable helping of salt. This laptop was already well within the stated requirements before the upgrades, and frankly the upgrades weren't all that huge. I seem to have started just on one side of the real line, and landed just on the other side of that line with the upgrades. There's _got_ to be a better way to find out what's wrong and what needs doing in these situations ... --best regards |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.pro
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Alesis IO-2 not obviously bad
David Satz wrote: This is a follow-up to some messages I posted here several months ago. I was trying to get an Alesis IO|2 to work reliably with a two-year-old Toshiba laptop, but it was skipping samples even with simple 44.1 kHz two-channel live recording. Recently I upgraded the RAM on the laptop from 256 MB to 512 MB and at the same time, upgraded its hard drive from a 4500 rpm model to a 5400 rpm model. The average access time of the new drive is only around 20% lower than the old one, but it has a much larger RAM buffer (8 MB). Somewhere in all of this, the computer's performance apparently reached the point at which there are no more glitches in the recorded waveforms at 44.1 kHz--at least I haven't seen any so far in some brief tests, This crap is so unpredictable. I never had any trouble recording on my four year old Dell laptop with 256 MB RAM and a 4200 RPM disk drive until I got up to 8 tracks with the Mackie Firewire mixer. Two tracks with a TASCAM US-122 worked just fine. I was getting regularly spaced glitches with the Mackie until I unplugged the network cable. A semi-permanent solution was a newer driver for the network card, more reliable solution was to disable the networking hardware in a hardware profile. (Next I intend to record a long stretch of tone and write a program to scan the resulting WAV file for glitches, since examining all the waveforms visually is tiresome.) That's the way I was testing. One of the guys here turned me on to a freeware program called Wave Repair which does a good job of detecting glitches, but it only works on a 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo file. Good enough for test purposes. Sound Forge has a "Find Glitch" tool, but it has a couple of sliders to adjust it and I can't understand what they really do and how they work, so I tried all combinations of sliders up and down and didn't find any glitches until I purposely introduced one to test the tester. What this tells me is that manufacturers' statements about the "minimum hardware requirements" may need to be taken with a considerable helping of salt. This laptop was already well within the stated requirements They don't have a clue. When I starrted shopping for a new laptop computer, I saw several user reports of glitching on Toshiba computers so I crossed that off my list. Manufacturers try their stuff out on whatever computers they and their tech support folks have and don't make any attempt to try to find "recommended" hardware. That's the nice thing about a dedicated hardware workstation - the manufacturer knows what the software has to deal with and makes adjustments accordingly. There's _got_ to be a better way to find out what's wrong and what needs doing in these situations ... Yeah. Quadruple the cost of the inexpensive hardware so that they can afford more extensive testing and sustaining engineering support, and not be afraid to publish useful information like: "If you have a Brand X model A320, Brand Y model B29, or Brand Z model AK47 notebook computer, don't buy this product. We've found that it doesn't work on those computers and we can't figure out how to make it work. " Like that's gonna happen. |
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