New Acer Aspire laptop.

[DrNomis_44]

That's a trust I don't have in myself, I trace back over all my steps before blaming something else.

Not disconnecting is not the same as not disturbing.

You may well be right but it's not the may my mind works.

Good luck with the hunt it's time for this old bloke to hit the sack

Thanks for your help anyway mate, much appreciated.....cheers.

[DrNomis_44]

Well, I think I have been as thorough as I possibly could while troubleshooting the crackly distortion issue I'm experiencing with my Scarlett 2i2 2nd gen usb audio interface, I think I've exhausted all the possible solutions and fixes, so, I think I should seriously look at buying a brand new usb audio interface from a different manufacturer, hopefully one that just works as it is supposed to.

[blinddrew]

Seriously Doc, try the ground connection plug first. Or at least confirm you have some form of solid ground in the system. Are you using monitors or headphones? If the former, what's the power arrangement?

[Simon Barden]

What Drew said. If you can run it off the laptop battery with no issues and the problem only occurs when it's on PSU power, then it's the lack of any system ground when running on the PSU that's the issue. Which a simple ground wire will fix. This is a known problem with laptop systems and the solution works (just read countless posts on the SOS forum). And all it takes is a bit of wire to test, not hours messing about with different cables and drivers and software configurations.

If it doesn't work, then look elsewhere, but try this first.

[king casey]

I had the same issue other week.
Crackling static hissing.
Often with pc's simply repeating the same process and expecting a different outcome works.
This counter-intuitive approach paid dividends for me.
Downloaded the latest driver (yet again) and bingo...problem solved.

cheers, Mark.

[DrNomis_44]

No worries, I'll give that a go today, I'll try running my laptop off it's battery and see if that stops the crackly distortion.

@ blinddrew I mainly use my pair of Audio Technica headphones with my 2i2, although I do have a pair of 15W Audioline powered studio monitors.


Update: As per Simon Barden's suggestion, I just tried playing back one of the demo songs in FL Studio, the same one I've been using for testing purposes, while I had the laptop running on it's internal battery power (i.e. completely disconnected from it's 240V AC plugpack adaptor), I was still getting the crackly distortion, so that seems to suggest that it's not a grounding-issue.

[blinddrew]

Well, that's disappointing, but worth doing the check.

[Simon Barden]

You'd probably still benefit from using it, but obviously not the major issue here.

I'd really suggest that you try and borrow another interface to test before buying another one. You may get exactly the same results, in which case you know it's almost certainly not the interface or its drivers. But if it does work faultlessly, then obviously there's a problem with what you have.

[DrNomis_44]

You'd probably still benefit from using it, but obviously not the major issue here.

I'd really suggest that you try and borrow another interface to test before buying another one. You may get exactly the same results, in which case you know it's almost certainly not the interface or its drivers. But if it does work faultlessly, then obviously there's a problem with what you have.

I actually did that the last time the crackly distortion issue manifested itself, a mate of mine had an older Scarlett 2i2 1st gen usb audio interface, which he brought round to my place so I could try it with my laptop to see if doing that would fix the issue, we found that it didn't, I got the same crackly distortion with his 2i2, the driver I was using at the time supported his 2i2.

So maybe it could be something to do with my Acer laptop then?, possibly either a software or a hardware issue involving my Acer laptop's usb ports, I'm now thinking that it's most likely a hardware issue with my laptop's usb ports, since if it was a software issue, doing a complete clean-install of Windows 10 and all my laptop's drivers and etc should have fixed it, I've tried a few different usb cables both short and long, with and without ferrite beads, interestingly, some of the usb leads I tried show a good connection between the metal ground-contacts of the usb plugs, at least one of them (the short red one) showed from about 10 Ohms to about 80 Ohms resistance between the two metal ground contacts, when I tested them using the continuity test function of my multimeter, all the usb leads I tried gave the same result, I wonder if the distorted-sound issue could be caused simply by a bad contact in the usb ports?, probably not cause then my laptop would have trouble reading the contents of usb thumb drives plugged into the ports....hmmmmm....

One thing I could try is seeing if I get the same crackly distortion issue with my Korg PX5D Pandora, it can be used as a usb audio interface, but the trouble is, Korg don't offer drivers for the PX5D that are compatible with Windows 10, the only available drivers are only compatible with Windows XP, and they are only 32 Bit, so I have to scratch the whole idea of trying my Korg PX5D Pandora.

Wouldn't it be so much nicer if we didn't have to keep installing driver software for all usb devices?, in theory usb should have been simply a plug-and-play affair, you plug the device into a usb port and the thing would just work full-stop.

Furthermore, wouldn't it be so much nicer if usb audio devices that supported the ASIO (Audio Streaming Input Output) protocol, didn't need software drivers to function properly?, Apple basically do something like that with their Core Audio system, there's no way I'd be able to fork-out the $8000.00 needed to buy a new Macbook Pro, besides if I was able to, then I'd have to fork-out more money for Mac OS versions of all the Windows Daw software I've already bought, that's an un-economical solution to the distortion issue I'm experiencing with my 2i2.


Just so you know, I updated my Acer laptop's Bios to the very latest version that Acer.com.au were offering on their website, the Bios update went without any hitches whatsoever, I did the update after the crackly distortion issue first manifested itself back in January this year, in the hope that it would fix the issue, the laptop boots-up properly, actually, it boots-up pretty fast with the new 1Tb M.2 SSD drive installed in it, about the same as for the original stock 256Gb M.2 SSD drive.

[DrNomis_44]

Well, that's disappointing, but worth doing the check.

Yeah that's true, well at least we eliminated one possible cause of the crackly distortion issue, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.


Wouldn't it be great if the real cause of the issue glowed a bright neon-yellow colour so it was easy to locate?


While trying to get my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 to work optimally with my studio desktop pc, I've read online that the best Firewire 400 ports to use with the Pro 40 are those that use Texas Instruments chipsets, that's something I just remembered, which got me thinking, I'm wondering if the chipsets that my Acer Laptop uses for it's usb ports are fine for data transference between a usb thumb drive and the laptop, but aren't quite up to the task of streaming audio?, I know that sounds a bit far-fetched.