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Heavy disk activity causes "noise" in sound playback and dropped frames in Premiere

T

Tempest261

Junior Member
I have a very odd problem that I'm practically tearing my hair out over. Whenever there is heavy disk access (such as a huge file transfer or defrag) on ANY of my drives, OR I'm doing something resource intensive such as editing/capturing video in Premiere Pro, I get very odd screeching/scratching noises in my audio, but only when a sound/mp3 is being played. I almost never get this in games.

Here's my system:

Asus P4C800 Deluxe, latest BIOS.
Intel P4 3.0 GHz HT(on)
2X 512 mb Corsair DDR CMX512-3200LL PC3200 set to 2-2-2-5 (stable) in Dual Channel
2X Seagate Sata 160 GB's on my motherboards SATA RAID ports, configured in RAID 0.
Promise FastTrak 378 on-board RAID controller.
Maxtor 6Y200P0 (200 GB) on IDE2, master.
Plextor PX-708A (dvd burner) on IDE1, master.
TDK 4800B (cd burner) on IDE2, slave.
Soundblaster Audigy 2 (tried every driver version I can get my hands on)
eVGA Geforce 6800 ULTRA

I also made a DirectX diagnostics file, available here: http://home.earthlink.net/~gevans96/DxDiag.txt

(any other info you guys need just let me know)

All of my drivers are up to date, and I've even tried 3rd party (KX) drivers for the Audigy with no success. I've also tried switching the soundcard's slot, and I have made sure that there are no IRQ conflicts with the Audigy or the Promise 378 Fasttrak RAID controller. Let me note though that this happens with disk activity on the 3rd (PATA) IDE drive as well. Another odd thing is that my on-board firewire port causes a dramatically higher number of dropped frames when capturing video than my Audigy's firewire port. Whenever frames are dropped in video, I also get the screeching/scratching sound in my audio. These two problems are definately connected. I also tried removing all USB/Firewire peripherals and doing a video capture- same problem. All of my tests were done with as many applications closed as possible.

Any ideas guys?

EDIT- forgot to mention that all drives are set to UDMA, so that's not a problem.
 
Hi & Welcome to the forums... 🙂

What software are you using to play your mp3s? Sounds like you've already been through the troubleshooting process with your hardware setup, perhaps it is software related. g/l
 
I wish it was software related. I tried iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media player. Thing is though that it's not just MP3's- any sounds (even the classic windows "DING") that are played during the heavy disk access is effected 🙁.
 
Sounds like a power issue. Try (termporarily) upgrading your PSU to something more powerful/better-quality, and see if the problem gets any better. I suspect though, that the problem is insufficient filtering/reserve power on the mobo, for things like the IDE ports and PCI cards, and heavy disk usage combined with heavy power usage for PCI cards, is causing noise problems that are being picked up by the sound card. This is something that ECS's and AOpen's specially-designated PCI slot is designed to help combat, although if the mobo had enough proper power filtration for all of the slots in the first place, this likely wouldn't be an issue. Are there very many, or in fact, any capacitors between/around the PCI slots at all?

Wait, no, I'm wrong.

It's probably because you are seeing heavy PCI-bus bandwidth usage, which "starves" the Creative sound card (Since they are known to hog the PCI bus), and thus you experience dropouts and breakups in the audio stream, which you would naturally only hear when a sound is being played. In fact that proves that my above theory is wrong, because that would likely happen regardless if you were playing a sound, as long as the analog volume was turned up high enough to hear any potential power-plane noise. Promise IDE controllers are also known for hogging the PCI bus. You need to get a hold of a "PCI latency tweaker" app, and set the numbers for the PCI latency for your devices downward, something like 32 or 64, instead of whatever they are currently set to, which is most likely 128 or higher for the Promise IDE controller.
 
Larry, that was the most helpful post I've read in weeks. I haven't solved the problem (actually at the 'rents house for the night) but I think you may be on to something with the power theory believe it or not. The reason why I don't think it's the Audigy card is because of the dropped frames in Premiere are the 2nd issue(although I don't know how much Premiere actually depends on the card for playback/capture). There's something seriously screwed up with that on-board firewire port, not to say that the Audigy's port is working perfectly either, but it works much better. However, I can test the Audigy theory pretty easily once I get back home since the Asus board DOES have an AC '97 (or something like that) on-board DAC- it's just disabled at the moment. I must assume however that the problem might be erradicated after removing the card because of the drop in power load, too.

I'm leaning on the power theory and here's why- the Geforce 6800 Ultra. That stupid thing (as I'm sure you know) needs 2 out of 3 PSU rails all to itself. I have 2 CD-roms, 3 HDD's, the Audigy's control panel, a plethora of fans, the floppy, and I'm sure some other stuff that I'm not even thinking about. Needless to say, that last rail is saturated. I don't know what effect this would have on the motherboard's components, including the RAID controller, but I'm sure it can't be good for the hard drives. Only conflict with this theory is that my PSU is an Antec 550 watt. Even though I have a ton of stuff on there I'd hope that it could still handle it... and then again, the biggest change that I made to the system around the time that this problem happened was around the time of the RAID controller being activated... at this point in the post I gotta try both theories, but in the end I hope I don't have to rip apart my RAID array 🙁.

Do you have a "PCI Latency Tweaker" that you could could recommend? (and as a side note a better sound card? I'm so sick of Creative... I miss A3D with all of my heart).
 
Changing the PCI latency didn't work 🙁. It was set stock at 64, and I tried lowering it to 32 and upping it to 128 and higher with no success or really any relative change. I did however yank out the Audigy 2 and tried my on-board system which seems to work, except the quality isn't all that great, and I loose EAX3 and all that. Anyone know how to get this to work with the Audigy 2 in there?
 
Did you check the PCI latency of all of the devices, not just the sound card? The biggest hog is probably the Promise controller, not the sound card specifically.
 
The PCI latency that I adjusted was in the BIOS for the ASUS board. It appeared to just apply to the entire bus. Other than that, I can't find any other adjustments in the BIOS or software-based solutions.
 
Hmm... Audigy 2s arent any fun in my experience. That wouldnt be the one with the frontpanel is it? Actually that is a common thing where the soundblaster firewire port performs like 20% better than onboard. Not sure why but it does just wierd having an exterlan HD using the front fw port.

Anyways Soundblaster is known for the lacking of stable drivers with windows anything. On my friends recording pc we got better results using the drivers that came with the card than the newest ones on the site.

I would call the 800 number to see what their tech support has to say, as Audigy 2s are super picky about what hardware and settings it wants to work with. which is why i think more people are moving over to delta cards and fw externals.

Something I didnt see u mention... has it always been this way or did it JUST start happening?
 
Before I switched over to RAID 0, I began noticing the "noise" during rare occurances and it was nothing that really bothered me because it was honestly maybe once a month that I noticed it and I could never purposefully reproduce the problem. When I added a second HDD and switched over to RAID 0, all hell broke loose. It was at this point that I began getting issues with the on-board firewire port.

In other news, I put in my old Aureal Vortex 2 card for shits and giggles and it worked great, except 4 channel audio doesn't work. Sounds incredible though. MAN I miss A3D. If someone made decent XP drivers for this thing I'd just keep on using it and forget about the Audigy.

I e-mailed support last night and got a reply at 3:30 AM (???) with the "tech" asking the typical flow-chart questions. I'll let you guys know if they come up with a solution besides buying an Audigy 4 (which I doubt would ever happen). One question though- what are "delta cards"? I'm seriously looking at alternatives.
 
I wouldnt email them... you have to call them bastards. If you get the tier1 foreign mess ask to be sent to the higher ups.

The firewire externals work great such as your external SB, deltas, m-audio even low yamaha came out with a multimedia pc external as well. The Audigy 2 however got like ½ sec offset when encoding large AIFFs or MPEG4.

I would go with m-audio for the masses.
 
You might also want to try the Audigy in another pci slot as resource contention may be causing the problem. Use Slot 1 or 5 as they share an IRQ with each other but not with anything else. Alternately, Slot 2 only shares with the onboard LAN. I'd also ensure that the onboard audio controller is disabled.

In addition, disable any onboard devices that you don't use - e.g the LPT port and COM1 and COM2.

HTH




 
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