Please Help!

[kvoid]

Hi guys,

Well I'll just cut to the s**t. I built myself a new computer to record stuff on two months ago after I lost my job since I have a lot of free time thought I'd get back into writing music. I spent about $1,500 on this machine, cause for once I didn't want to optimize everything for audio/disable a bunch of services and mix more than four tracks with vst fx and monitoring.

From the start this turned into a nightmare.

First my once trusty old Line 6 Toneport KB37 refused to play along by leading to a BSOD right after connecting it the first time. On reboot at the welcome screen as soon as the welcome sound is to be played the screen locks up, garbles horizontally with chopped up garbage and restarts. I have tried disabling all unnecessary hardware in the BIOS, tried every USB port. It wouldn't budge. Only on random occasions it will work, but when the computer restarts its back to its old ways.

I've tried different USB cables, I don't have any wireless on this PC.

I contacted Line 6 support through the forum and they ignored me completely. I opened another thread and after somebody chipped in that they were experiencing something similar with a POD X3 I was opened a customer support ticket. They asked me for my crashdump file, my msinfo32 report and the line6 monkey log. I submitted all of these two weeks ago.

Five days later I inquired whether they had any info and the customer support guy told me he'd reply tomorrow. That was a week ago. I lost my nerve a few days ago and told them to man up and tell me if this was busted or if they were just not going to update their drivers so I could go out and get something else.

This is extremely infuriating since I spent a $100 on POD Farm 2 and three expansion packs while I was still building the system, and they have basically shown that they don't give a damn about me or hundreds of other customers that are out there seeking a solution on their support forums.

I've also bought a PCI USB expansion card with an NEC chip as I've seen it recommended somewhere but this causes an IRQ problem which I have no idea how to rectify on a Win 7 64 Ultimate.

However, it works perfectly on my old Acer Netbook running Windows XP.

My system specs are:

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
ASUS Crosshair IV Formula
OCZ Platinum DDR3 1333 3x2GB
XFX 5770 XXX
Seagate Barracuda 250GB
WD Caviar Green 1TB

I also have an old M-Audio Firewire 1814 that has been crapped out since 2007 when it started dropping connection to the computer. I now work with it but it's a pain since it drops connection randomly and the only way I know of using it is to switch it off/turn it back on again and pray for the best. SOmetimes it will remain working but it will freeze the outputs and inputs which again, requires me to restart it.

If anybody knows any solution to this or has any advice regarding the problems I'm experiencing, I'd really appreciate it a lot.

If however this is not something that can be worked out, I would appreciate your input and suggestions on a replacement interface. It would need to have at least one preamp, phantom power, midi connectivity (I would like a keyboard/interface like this kb37 I've got actually so I can play some synths), and low latency. I was thinking of the TC Konnekt 6 but it has no MIDI. It goes without saying that I would absolutely not consider any Line6 or M-Audio product. I'd probably rather use an answering machine to record audio than the aforementioned two companies.

Thanks in advance guys you're my last hope

 

[guitarguru777]

Update to all the latest drivers on your system.
Did you install the Mother Board drivers from the manufacturer?

Take out 1 stick of ram and test, does it still happen?
If not try taking the other stick out and putting the first one back in, does it happen now? If so .. bad ram

Try to disable all ON BOARD audio, and video in the bios, and then try it, does it work?

How many PCI slots on the board? If its only one its ALWAYS going to share an IRQ with your video, this is BAD, get a mobo with more PCI slots.

If it has more then one move the PCI card to a different slot and try it.

 

[kvoid]

Update to all the latest drivers on your system.
Did you install the Mother Board drivers from the manufacturer?

yes, all updated, even the bios.

Take out 1 stick of ram and test, does it still happen?
If not try taking the other stick out and putting the first one back in, does it happen now? If so .. bad ram

haven't done that yet, will give that a try, i did run memtest though, successfully.

Try to disable all ON BOARD audio, and video in the bios, and then try it, does it work?

Tried, disabled the onboard audio in bios and hdmi audio out on the gfx card in device manager, no good.

How many PCI slots on the board? If its only one its ALWAYS going to share an IRQ with your video, this is BAD, get a mobo with more PCI slots.

If it has more then one move the PCI card to a different slot and try it.

one only yeah, the rest are all PCIe. Didn't know about that, this mobo cost way too much (second only to the gigabyte ud7), but it appears it's not without a few faults.

Thanks guitarguru I'll give the RAM swap a whirl and report back asap. I hope that's it though since I hope I won't have to swap the board out. It does look like what a RAM problem would do with the abrupt display garbage and reboot.

 

[guitarguru777]

Did you buy quality memory or just what they had on sale?

I only use Corsair in my systems and have never had an issue, yea I pay a premium but its always good and has a 2 year warranty!

 

[Trevoire520]

I wouldn't rule out M Audio altogether, the Profire is one of the best interfaces in it's price range and the drivers are very good. A totally different ball game compared to the 1814.

 

[kvoid]

I tried your suggestion with the RAM swap and test, I tried with one stick in every position, swapped for another and did the same, tried with two...no good, it keeps doing the same damn thing... I'm officially out of ideas. The Toneport works on my old XP machine I tested it again. I believe it has to do something with the initializing of the driver.

While I was trying it out I managed to get it to work once and it was stable, I don't really know what gives but I am guessing it may be a service of some kind or the way windows assigns an IRQ to the unit. After restart and with nothing changed in the BIOS or the hardware/software, it was causing crashes and reboots again.

I do not doubt the Profire 2626 to be good stuff but I'm reluctant to give money to a company that's already made an idiot out of me to the tune of 400$ without as much as an apology. I hope there are alternatives out there though and would appreciate some advice

 

[beyond dead]

best advice i can give you is to throw the tone port on the garbage and say "fuck you line 6" with me! haha

if you hate maudio and wont buy a profire, then look into a presonus interface. presonus firebox can be had cheap on the used market. my firepod worked great for ages

 

[beyond dead]

I would suggest you convert to the dark side of computing, but I may get shot.

 

[kvoid]

best advice i can give you is to throw the tone port on the garbage and say "fuck you line 6" with me! haha

if you hate maudio and wont buy a profire, then look into a presonus interface. presonus firebox can be had cheap on the used market. my firepod worked great for ages

I'm inches away from beating that nasty heap of red and black plastic with a hammer, recording a video of it and putting it up on youtube.

Just read an article about the decline of Dell, for selling faulty computers and lying about it InfoWorld called them a "rotten company". In comparison and I guess thanks to economies of scale, audio interface manufacturers are allowed to get away with bloody murder.

I don't really understand Line6, they went from a pioneering company some 15 years ago to top-of-the-trash-heap peddlers of (relatively) overpriced garbage. I'll definitely consider that PreSonus actually, since it's cheap I might have some money left to throw on a GAP-73 pre and not worry too much about the built in preamp side of things when recording vocals.

 

[joeymusicguy]

line 6 hardware is kind of hit or miss

i use ilok for pod farm, its great

 

[kvoid]

I fixed it! whew...two months after I put together this computer I can finally record music and practice the mixing skills I've learnt lurking 'round here.

It was after all the usbfilter.sys AMD USB 1.0/1.1 driver. It was the problem file that was the culprit of my earlier BSODs (for the last month I had been getting no BSODs at all, just rapid crash/reboots), updated it and now it works like a charm, well kind of it still has those stellar preamps everyone loves.

I was updating my gfx card drivers (catalyst) today and noticed it had no update on the old version in the package so I updated the Southbridge and AHCI packages as well and sure enough one of them had a newer version of the usbfilter.sys. The great peripheral deity that is ASUS never featured these updates on their site so I never thought of updating them. This mobo I paid 230 dollars for has been an utter failboat. From the one PSI slot and the problems associated as pointed out by guitarguru, to faulty heatsinks I had to modify myself, straight to lackluster driver support, ASUS have made my shitlist. Premium product my ass.

Thank you all for the advice I guess this L6 will hopefully keep up until I get a new job and some money for an RME. Been wanting one since I've been visiting this corner of the internets.

edit: and if you're looking to build a new rig, do give this AMD X6 some consideration. Six cores for less than $300 can't be beat, I don't know about other DAWs but Reaper knows how to use the additions pretty well I must say. Just steer well clear of ASUS and their mobos.

 

[guitarguru777]

I havent been watching this thread like a dick ....lol

That was actually my next suggestion

As far as "premium" mobos, Asus is up there but not the best. They lack driver support in a HUGE way. I always go with Gigabyte personally. But congrats man!!!

 

[kvoid]

Thanks I'm really stoked, I'm kinda broke and wanted to put a little demo together with a friend of mine, plus I need some new pickups on my supercheap guitar. I've been out of the system builder game for a long while and yeah I'm all for Gigabyte too but I couldn't wait for their new UD5/UD7 boards to become available, of course ASUS beat everyone to market as usual...This ASUS board has stupid buttons on it, lights up like a christmas tree with voltage indicator LEDs..however like most things that bling, it fails at the basics...