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Hello! Audigy 4 Pro + Adobe Audition = Mysterious Drift

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Topic Hello! Audigy 4 Pro + Adobe Audition = Mysterious Drift
Hi folks!

My real name is Bill, and I'm posting to find out if anyone else out there is having or has had the same problem I'm about to describe.

First of all, my basic system stats:
Motherboard: MSI NEO-K8T FIS2R
PCU: Athlon 64 3200+
RAM: 2 GB of Kingston 400Mhz
Soundcard: Brand New Audigy 4 Pro
OS: WinXP SP2

My friend and I have been trying to record some original songs with Adobe Audition 1.5. My experience is limited to home recording on 4-tracks and with previous versions of Cool Edit, plus some MIDI meandering. My friend is a C++ programmer with loads of technical knowledge, and he's also spent time interning in a professional recording studio.

We've been trying to record 96Khz/32-bit sessions, and we can't seem to lay down a single track without experiencing numerous playback glitches and a marked drift in the timing of the recorded track from the original tempo. We've got a couple of computerized click tracks we produced with Rebirth, and those are looped in Audition at 76bpm. Then there's a scratch/guide guitar/vocal take, which is perfectly in time with the clicks.

But every new guitar or vocal we attempt to get through either has an audible timing screw-up of the guide tracks, which causes us to stop recording, and/or the newly recorded track, upon playback, drifts further and further out of the correct tempo as it approaches the end of the song. There is an option in Audition's setting for "drift correction", which does some post-processing after recording a take, and this does seem to knock it back into the correct time, but we still don't know what's causing the drift, so that we might be able to prevent it from happening and not have to apply this corrective filter.

Does anyone with a simliar setup have suggestions as to the optimal buffer settings, etc. to use in Audition? Are we just pushing the hardware beyond its limits? The card is supposed to be capable of a lot more, it seems. I've only got a couple of weeks left in which to return it, if the card is the weak link.
2
Hello Bill,

First of all, contrary to claims, the Audigy only operates at 48 khz 24 bit, regardless of the freq and bit setting you have in Audition. Everything is downsampled to that rate. Creative has been sued and have subsequently settled their case. You can find some details here.

Best you return the Audigy as it is a gamer's card anyway and get something more appropriate like Maudio or better.

While I understand the need for higher fidelity, why the need for 96 khz? Aside from bigger file sizes, it imposes higher demands on your pc and, depending on soundcard, could lead to lower track counts. If you are mixing to dvd, I can understand the requirement, but if you are releasing to cd, the resulting downsampling could produce unwanted artifacts unless handled properly by a mastering engineer.

Best,[/url]
3
Damn. Thanks for that little tidbit. I was on the phone with Creative Customer Support twice today, giving them all my specs and telling them what we were trying to do and what was going wrong, and not once did either of the "technicians" I was speaking to think to mention that "by the way, everything is getting downsampled to 48Khz on the card, so that might just be the problem". Toward the end of the conversation, they did try to upsell me on an EMU card, which I guess is Creative's pro-level line. And that's quite a ballsy move to make when you're talking to a customer dissatisfied by one of your products: oh, the Audigy sucks? Then why don't you just buy one of more expensive cards, and that will solve your problem for sure! Bastards.

My friend is serving as my engineer for this project, and as the glitches have continued unabated through several days worth of attempted recording sessions, I've been questioning him myself as to the need for 96Khz. Being a programmer of WAV-manipulating applications, he's got a good deal of mathematical reasoning behind this choice, which basically boils down to capturing as full and rich a signal as possible from the source instrument, so there is plenty to work with and compress into a final CD mix. I'm trusting that he's experienced enough to be able to downsample properly and avoid creating artifacts.

On the other hand, these are the first 96Khz sessions he's tried, but only because I bought an Audigy 4, which according to its on-the-box specs, should be capable of that and much more, as should my system in general. It's gradually become more and more of a quest just to figure out what's been going wrong. At least now, we know it's the card, so we can actually move forward with the recording at 48Khz until I get a more honestly labeled, downright better model.

Again, thanks a heap for that info. I've come up with so many troubleshooting scenarios that I was starting to lose it.
4
Tongue-in-cheek response...

I happen to own one of those Emu cards, the 1820m, and while you will read in some parts that it does contain the Audigy chip, its implementation is very different. I'm not selling you on Creative/Emu; I have plans of getting the Presonus Firepod or Firebox, but I'm actually very happy with the performance of the Emu card in general. Unlike the Audigy, the Emu does what it says, but it is what I would call a tweaker's card. You can't just slap it onto any mobo and get it working right off the bat, It seems to work well with Nforce boards; Via chipsets are just plain headaches. There are users with P4 boards out there, but the happy ones are just plain quietly working away. My immediate plans for this Emu is to add an ADA8000 so I can have a full 16 inputs ready.

If you're really serious about 96 khz, the most headache free and stable cards I can recommend are the ones from RME and Lynx. Incredibly pricey (usually in excess of $1000) but well worth it IMO. It also seems that firewire is the wave of the future too. Anyway, I will be upgrading my DAW to an Athlon64 machine in the next few months and we shall see how this Emu performs. I primarily bought it for the Emulator sampler and that has been a very satisfying experience, though a steep learning curve for me as far as sampling goes.

Stay away from the obvious gamer cards and go for something more pro if you're really serious about your music. I might have colored your opinion about Creative/Emu; only time will tell if they can recover the customers confidence. But do keep an open mind about the choices out there.

Best,
5
I've actually already spent some time surfing around looking at the E-Mu 1820M. Not bad at all. But you're two for two in warding me away from Creative and their ilk, because my motherboard's got VIA all over it. It was supposed to be a "tweaker's" board, but the thing barely holds together at default settings.

Not that I don't want to eventually replace my sorry excuse for a motherboard, but for now I'd like to find a suitable sound card that doesn't require the replacement. I could conceivably convince my friend to work in 48kHz and just keep the Audigy (I'm a big fan of the I/O Hub, which even happens to match my case), but it's still early enough to return it and I feel slighted both by their false feature advertising and lame customer support ("Hey, did you know we lost this class-action lawsuit concerning this particular card?"). I'd rather spend that dough on something that at the very least does what it says it can.

Back to the catalog I go.
6
Good luck on your quest, Bill!

If I may suggest a few, these I know of to be 24/96 ready:

M-Audio Delta 1010, Presonus Firebox/FirePod, and RME HDSP 9632 - all around the $500 range (could be lower if you keep digging around; if you have to know, the Emu is now going for $385 here). Bugger! Had I know about this, I would have bought my Emu there instead of Musicians Friend. :evil:

Anyway, happy hunting!