Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 problems on brand new iMac

michael towns, are you from focusrite ?

the reason i ask is that ive just recieved my brand new imac today, and just like everybody else i get 10 seconds of audio from my Pro 40, so i went looking, and on the focusrite site under the maverik link it says that there are no problems with maverik and my card, however you say to download a beta of the next maverik update as a posible fix, so therefore there is a problem and your site is thus reporting the wrong info.

i'm feeling pretty angry as you can imagine, and im going to direct that at Apple.

is there any way this can get addressed by apple as a priority ?

many thanx

Glen Orpheus

ok i just got off the phone to apple support, who told me its a known problem, and that it's a fault with Maveriks and FD's. he also informed me that engineers were working on a solution, but it was not known if the fix will be in 10.9.2 or 10.9.3 and also no time frame is known for each release, so we could be waiting months for the first one.

he then offered me either a complete refund or exchange for another imac without a FD.

anyhow ive got 13 days still to make up my mind....dicisions, dicisions.

Yes I am from Focusrite, our units are compatible with Mavericks, the issue has been with the FD. We are working with apple for an update as soon as possible, im glad you got that cleared up.

Best,

Mike Towns

ive decided to exchange my Imac for one with a 512GB SSD and boxing it back up this weekend, as i downloaded the beta of 10.9.2 and installed it, it does fix the issue with my Saffire Pro 40 not cutting out every 10 seconds, but im getting the odd distorted sound, glitches and the odd drops in audio for a 10th of a second maybe...so im not convinced its a true fix just yet.

This is all deeply depressing. Have just invested c. £4k in top of range iMac and Saffire Pro 24, plus Hauptwerk to find that I can only play for a short time before the audio cuts out. Is this problem unique to Focusrite products and would a different audio interface therefore solve it please, or will be FD problem affect all interfaces?

as far as i am aware this is effecting quite a few other brands as well, not just focusrite.

my advice is to ditch the FD and get a replacement SSD or mechanical drive.

i tried the beta of 10.9.2 update and my audio dosnt drop out anymore, but i have a few odd glitches in audio from time to time, so dont think its completly sorted, some people may be able to live with that but not me.

im just waiting for apple to pick mine up and exchange the drive from a FD to an SSD 🙂

Thanks Glen. Ironically it worked fine on my old Core 2 Duo Vista laptop with just 2GB of memory, other than the cripplingly slow load times! That's not a long-term solution though, so will consider doing what you suggest.

I must be extremely lucky. I am running a Retina MBP i7 (OS X 10.9.1) with a Focusrite Pro 40 and have had no problems in Cubase, Garageband, Reaper or Ableton. I/O pretty rock solid. I generally record to external usb 3 drive. The only reason I came to this thread was because I am considering Logic as an additional tool, and am doing my due diligence in trying to see what potential problems there may be. Looks like there may be some. Things used to be so simple(ish) !

Hey Chris

do you have a Fusion Drive in your macbook Pro, as im not so sure its a Logic thing (audio cut out after 10 seconds what ever you do, ITuns,Garageband,Logic), more of a Thunderbolt/Firewire conflict....with the fix coming on the next Maverik update.

ive done quite a search on this, and it appears to be affecting more than just focusrite cards, also ive heard of problems with Video capture cards over Firewire.

anyhow if you are in the market for Logic, which i highly recomend, and your about to buy Logic Pro X make sure that all your plugins are 64bit as it wont except 32bit any more 🙂

Hi Glen,

I hadn't appreciated tha the problem was more likely with an FD ...I have a bog standard Half Terabyte SSD.

Fortunately I don't have a vast array of plugins...I can generally get by with whatever comes with the applications, failing that gems occasionally crop up on KRV.

I can understand a Fusion Drive being problematic, the scheduling and cacheing strategies must be completely different.

Maybe Logic is worth a whirl....

Cheers...

The problem does seem to be the Fusion Drive. I followed the partitioning procedure suggested by michaeltownsfocusrite at the top of this thread and all has worked fine since. Thank you Mike!

Michael,

Can you provide a little more information about the drive partitioning?

For everyone else, I'm experiencing this problem with an original Saffire on my brand-new 27" iMac (3TB fusion drive). The interface had been working perfectly with a 2011 macbook pro...

tl;dr me too!

Hello everybody,

I've just updated mavericks on my Imac late 2013, to version 10.9.2 and my focusrite Saffire pro 24 has been playing for over 30 minutes now without dropping out.

Before this update i experienced the same issue's with audio dropping out after 10 seconds as many of you but it looks like the problem has been solved.....

So far so good for me with 10.9.2, presonus firestudio project, late 2013 iMac with Fusion. Where once with 10.9 there was silence after a few seconds, now, I have joyous sound again.