1 Topic by roderrooder (edited by roderrooder 2017-08-02 18:16:44)

  • Registered: 2017-08-02
  • Posts: 21

Topic: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

Hello all,

I am very new to the internal audio card game, the interface I switched from was the Gen 1 Scarlett 2i2 interface. I got sick of latency issues and I felt it was hurting my process and desire to make music, after weeks of research I came to the conclusion I wanted an internal PCIe Card. I saw many videos of people getting down to 3-5ms of round trip latency, 3-4x the performance I was getting with my Scarlett. Seemed like a no-brainer, alas either I'm a noob and am doing something wrong or I got a defective card. I was hoping I could get a little help.

I'll start with saying I bought the HDSPe Rev1.4 in a bundle from eBay with output and input expansion boards, I didn't yet fully understand AD/DA Converters and this seemed like the simplest solution to get an internal interface going. After updating the cards firmware and installing drivers I had my output going through the AO4S-192 AIO expansion board into a mixer which is hooked up to my monitors, but wasn't getting the best audio quality. On top of that it appeared the 4th output channel was clipping at almost all times, I contacted the seller and did a partial return on that board and after a bit more research I purchased the ADI-2. Clipping and audio quality sounded great as soon as I hooked it up, after finally installing all my music plugins and software I was ready to see ultra-low latency in action. Unfortunately I did not... Using ASIO running the card at 44100 samples and a 256 buffer size I was already getting occasional clicks and pops, weird. Bumped it down to 128 and I got nothing but crunchy, late, and horrible sounding audio.

This seemed odd to me as I've read on many forums posts that people successfully ran fully mastered projects with 70 tracks, dozens of plugins, and even full suites of mastering plugins on the master tack while maintaining extremely low latency... I tried different PCIe ports, didn't seem to do anything, all of them rated above the 1.0 it was built for. So now the question in my head is - did I buy and entirely defective card, or do I just not know how to configure it? It appears I have the audio routed to 1/2 analog in Ableton, with no clear way to route directly to ADAT 1/2 (in ASIO), and then in Totalmix I just turn up software playback for analog 1/2. Is this where I am wrong? Something else I'm missing? So here I am $1700 in with performance worse than my $150 2i2, would love any advice. PS the lowest I can get my Latency with acceptable audio is 14ms.

System Specs:
Windows 10 PRO
RAMPAGE IV Black Edition Motherboard
Core i7 3930K @ 4.2GHz (Hexa-Core)
32GB DDR3 @ 1600MGHz
GTX 1080
PCIe Adapter running an Intel 600p M.2 drive
x2 Samsung 850 Pro SSDs in RAID 0

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2017-08-02 18:37:06)

  • ramses
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  • Registered: 2012-10-14
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Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

> Clipping and audio quality sounded great as soon as I hooked it up, after finally installing all my music plugins
> and software I was ready to see ultra-low latency in action. Unfortunately I did not... Using ASIO running the
> card at 44100 samples and a 256 buffer size I was already getting occasional clicks and pops, weird.
> Bumped it down to 128 and I got nothing but crunchy, late, and horrible sounding audio.

What is now exactly your setup ?
Do you have your ADI-2 connected via ADAT to the HDSPe AIO ?
How long is your TOSLINK cable for ADAT ? Did you try another one ?
To which device are your monitors connected ? AIO or ADI-2 ?

Shall the monitors be connected to the ADI-2 which is connected to the AIO via ADAT:
Who is the clock master ? I would recommend to use the AIO as clock master as its connected to the PC.
If the AIO is the clock master, then the ADI-2 needs to get clock from ADAT.

What is the the lowest ASIO Buffersize, which you can configure in the RME driver settings dialog ?
If you look into the handbook an ASIO buffersize of 123 results in 3ms, thats only very few latency.

If your setup and clock and cabling is ok, then you need to find out, why audio loss happens with a buffersize of 128 and 256 because this is very unusual.

Did you try LatencyMon to find out, whether eventually a driver is misbehaving ?
Did you deactivate in the BIOS everything which has to deal with energy saving ?
Are you using in windows the high performance energy profile ?
Did you configure Windows to priotize background services ?
Did you try to disable CPU core parking ?
Did you try whether it makes a difference if you deactivate Hyperthreading in the BIOS ?
Did you choose a PCIe slot where its PCIe lanes are not shared with other components of the mainboard ?
Did you disable internal sound card of mainboard and all not required hardware ?
Do you use WLAN or Bluetooth adapter on your mainboard, did you try to disable those ?
Did you eventually install additional tools which come from mainboard vendor which are badly written and can slowdown / block the whole PC like i.e. blower control programs or other software which came bundled with the mainbaord ?
Best is to install only the required drivers: chipset driver, driver for network card, USB3 .. but not more

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2017-08-02
  • Posts: 21

Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

To clarify how I am currently set up:

Optical OUT from HDSPe to IN on ADI-2
Optical OUT from ADI-2 to IN on HDSPe
Analog 1/4 R&L outputs from ADI-2 to Mackie PROFX12 Mixer
Analog XLR R&L outputs from Mackie PROFX12 Mixer to Yamaha HS8 Subwoofer
Analog XLR R&L outputs to Yamaha HS5 Monitors


>I have tried going directly from the ADI-2 to the Yamaha Sub and Directly to the speakers with no difference in audio quality / latency although I'm sure that is to be expected.
>My toslink cables are braided, gold plated, and 10ft long.
>I have the clock set to "Internal" in DSP settings, not sure if that is what you are referring to in reference to the clock.
>It gives me the option to put buffer size down to 32
>Majority of my components are overclocked and performance mode in enable in bios and OS
>I have my HDSPe plugged into one of my to PCIe2.0 slots which should be on a entirely separate lane from my graphics card and M.2 Drive that are on 3.0 slots.
>No motherboard bundled bloatware installed, all other audio drivers uninstalled and disabled.

I have not yet tried LatencyMon, I did not know it existed, I will try all other things you listed also. But it seems strange that any of those minor fixes could solve this, seeing as it appears to be egregiously under performing. I assumed I had configured it wrong in Ableton or something, no way to route directly to ADAT via ASIO in a DAW?

Thank you for the reply and help.

4 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2017-08-02 19:19:21)

  • ramses
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Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

> no way to route directly to ADAT via ASIO in a DAW

The AIO ASIO driver should present the DAW all possible inputs and outputs.
In TotalMix FX you route the DAW Output (which you find in TM FX under Software Playback Channels)
to the TM Main Output which is your ADAT 1/2 HW output channel (you should assign ADAT 1/2 as Main Out there).

I think you need a primer in TM FX, I created this: http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … rnal-equi/

From RME these video tutorials exist: http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … al-Videos/

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2017-08-02
  • Posts: 21

Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

https://s4.postimg.org/qrmexkl25/Latency.png

So Is this saying both my graphics driver and network driver are somehow screwing with my card? I disabled my WLAN with the same result, surely I can't be expected to disable all networking, also a double edged sword with my video card or graphics driver hmm

  • ramses
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Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

The AIO is ok, you need to find the root cause for your system blocking CPU ..
If you cant use WLAN, then take power lan ...

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2017-08-02
  • Posts: 21

Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

Hey just wanted to update that after looking further into both those problems, installing a new network driver, and disabling all NVIDIA audio devices my latency and audio quality is now in check.

Buffer at 64 no clicks or pops that I can tell.

Thanks a ton for the help, apologies for the ignorance.

  • ramses
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  • Registered: 2012-10-14
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Re: Abysmal Performance With HDSPe AIO

Good job, thanks for the feedback.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13