Crackles when playing into my interface

  • I'm playing my Kemper into a Focusrite Saffire pro 24 via SPDIF.


    SYNC SOURCE IS SPDIF

    I'm getting static like crackles through my interface when playing. At first at thought it was my monitors, but I also hear the crackles through my headphones.

    No crackles through the cab or when I plug headphones into the Kemper, so I'm assuming its an interface problem. Crackles also record.

    Audio interface is firewire, via an apple dongle to thunderbolt.

    I've shut down all programs, I've restarted the computer, I've restarted the interface.......Crackle is still there.

    Any other suggestions or is my interface on the way out?


    Thanks for taking the time to read this and potentially help me out.

  • The Profiler must be the master, the interface must be the slave. Have you verified this?

    Yes. It seems to be intermittent, I'm sure I've had this problem before. At the moment I'm looking at tiding up my wiring within the whole setup, hoping that really cleans up my signals.

  • 99.9% times the problem is one of these settings:


    Buffer size

    DAW driver (try switching to ASIO4ALL if you can, not sure if it's only Windows, if not then update your drivers at least)

    Cables

    External USB drives? Just having one connected can create crackles, but if you're recording to an external drive that's usually a bottleneck.


    My guess is the culprit here is the Firewire-to-dongle hack, the signal converter is messing with the signal enough to throw the clock off. From my understanding that dongle is not really made for recording, only playback.


    One (annoying) solution to this would be to record only the DI guitar via analog input, then reamp through s/pdif with buffer set to max. See if that gets rid of the crackle.

  • Every time I have had an issue with crackling over a digital connector it related to clock settings... whether you can set them on your geat (or for that matter on the Kemper) I cant advise... but worth maybe looking in that area. Hope it helps.

    Careful I'm watching you...