sudden distorted sound - faulty apogee duet/ other ideas?

Question

Level 1

44 points

sudden distorted sound - faulty apogee duet/ other ideas?

Hi, switched to a new apogee duet 2 weeks ago, & fine for a week but in sessions over the last week, every hour or 2, for no given reason the sound suddnly becomes hugely distorted (like a digital distortion).

I've been running the sample rate at 128 as recommended by apogee, but tried switching down to 256 & resetting core audio,but no difference. the only way to get the sound back is to quit logic, & then restart the mac. doesnt seem to happen with any regularity as to what i'm doing & this song has been made from scratch in L8, & since having the apogee, so nothings changed...

Any ideas or simliar experiences anybody??

Cheers, Adam

Intel iMac 20' 2 Gig Ram. Macbook. LP8. Apogee Duet. DynaudioBM5a's, Mac OS X (10.4.10), myspace.com/zlisters and beatcircus.co.uk

Posted on Oct 30, 2007 2:14 PM

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Answer 1

A_Double__ Author

Level 1

44 points

Oct 30, 2007 2:22 PM in response to A_Double__

Hmm.. strange... just tried 'refresh connections' in the maestro software which (unless it was a coincidence) seemed to solve it without restarting this time...bloody mysterious, haven't changed any connections or settings when its 'gone'. will try & relipcate this next time to make sure, any ideas as to cause/diagnosis??

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Answer 2

Jan 17, 2008 8:31 AM in response to A_Double__

I have the exact same problem, but every couple of minutes!! And mine is brand new...

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Answer 3

Jan 17, 2008 10:24 AM in response to A_Double__

fellow duet user here. Somehow the sampling rate gets messesd up causing the distortion.

I keep an Audio/MIDI Setup window open and reset the sampling rate to 44.1k whenever this happens, which is random tho I suspect spotlight.

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Answer 4

Jan 17, 2008 10:40 AM in response to A_Double__

Does it happen on both your imac and macbook?

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Answer 5

Jan 23, 2008 9:03 AM in response to marceldada

Well, I'm using a macbook, and the guy above me is using a mini mac, and the guy that started the thread is using an imac. It looks like it's faulty whatever it's plugged into...

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Answer 6

robs2

Level 1

0 points

Jan 23, 2008 7:52 PM in response to A_Double__

Same deal here - just hooked up a new Duet to a new iMac, and it seems that whenever I accidentally overdrive the inputs a little, the distortion starts. After that, it's stuck in distort mode - backing the levels down at that point won't make it go away. A reboot will reset everything to normal again, but that seems a little extreme.

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Answer 7

ptoh

Level 1

0 points

Jan 23, 2008 8:10 PM in response to robs2

i also have a duet. i too get a distortion randomly but only for a split second then it goes away so by the time i hear it it's gone. but i don't know what it is either. is this what you guys are talking about? or does your stay distorted? i would like this to go away but figured it was my computer not keeping up. but i have 3g of ram in a macbook. should be aight right?

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Answer 8

negv

Level 1

15 points

Jan 24, 2008 12:03 AM in response to ptoh

I have never had this problem with my duet - having said that I'm the only one on this thread that doesn't use it with an Intel Mac...I don't use Leopard on my music machines either...could this be the root of the problem ? Only Apogee could tell us I reckon.

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Answer 9

A_Double__ Author

Level 1

44 points

Jan 24, 2008 5:51 AM in response to negv

Just noticed this post pop back to life, I actually resolved my issue a while back - its covered in this post - http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1246922&tstart=0

in my case it was down to the other peripherals I was using on firewire (my iMac has a shared fw bus)

I now run my audio off the internal iMac drive, & have switched my external drives to run off USB to be used for backup only, & the duets been perfect since - I guess it uses more FWire bandwidth than lesser interfaces or something....

As I mentioned in the other linked post above, I'd suggest anyone having an issue drop appogee tech support a line, they were great to deal with helping me troubleshoot & solve my issue

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Answer 10

Jan 24, 2008 7:38 AM in response to negv

I had exactly this problem running an Apogee Ensemble with an Intel Mac and Leopard. The problem was the same running through Peavey mixing board. I would get distortion which could only be fixed by restarting the computer. I installed Tiger and the problem disappeared completely and never came back.

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Answer 11

pedreros

Level 1

5 points

Jan 24, 2008 11:33 AM in response to A_Double__

I have a problem with a distorsion, but just when I use several waves plugs in. A very noisly sound followed by no sound tracks

Somebody else?

NIC

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Answer 12

SeeBee

Level 1

105 points

Jan 24, 2008 8:36 PM in response to A_Double__

I have been getting this distortion every so often. Today I got a error message in Logic saying there was a conflict with Logic and the audio interface(duet). I opened Itunes played a song no distortion went back to Logic distortion. So I think it's something going on in Logic. If it were the firewire bus I would think that Itunes would play distorted audio.

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