User manual TERRATEC AUDIO TWEAKS

[. . . ] Under the cover lies hidden a lot of heavy analogue technology which has a big effect on the digital side. We are talking about capacitors as large as beer cans integrated in power supplies and VGA cards, highperformance motors that could power a car, or even exposed wires that create an antenna effect. In such cases where interference is higher than the shielding of your soundcard can handle, you will surely hear noise. This noise usually manifests itself as a constant hum or glitches (scratching/clicking sounds), or even a sound relating to the rotary speed of the motor that is influencing the card. [. . . ] Surely you have taken the wrong exit when driving over a motorway. And you have most certainly experienced a traffic jam. All these effects can also happen to the PCI bus. Components that cause a high amount of traffic or CPU load can slow down other components. Packages can go the wrong way without any return or a component that does not match the standard can jam other devices (imagine a 5 meter wide car and your chances of overtaking it) or the whole system. Some of these and many other data transport mistakes happen to almost every PC. But while VGA cards have a really efficient error correction (you wont notice if the card drops one faulty picture when it receives 100 new ones within a second) , an audio card is forced to play back all the data it receives. It is clocked by a constant sampling rate and accepts all input signals, even those that may cause undesirable effects. But not only jammed data packages can be the reason for distortion, also temporarily interrupting the data stream to the audio card can (or most surely will) cause dropouts and glitches in the sound. The most common case is a PCI card that generates a high amount of bus traffic, like some SCSI/RAID controllers. While this card is busy transferring as much data as possible in the least amount of time (i. e. to outperform a competitors card in a benchmark), your bus motorway is occupied by a heavy transporter that doesn't let other information pass by. This happens, for example, when you start up Windows and use a so-called start-up sound. When the computer is starting up, all devices use interrupt commands (IRQs). Actually the whole computer runs at full power. And because the MME sound device has a really low priority, it is the first one that has to wait when the power gets scarce. Have you already disabled your Windows system sounds?It's time to do so! Removing most digital influences Most, if not all of these weak points can be corrected by little tweaks to the system. Of course we can't mention them all here, but we will address the most common ones. Before we get started. . . . . . you should ensure that all other hardware in the system is running properly. In almost all cases another component in the computer is jamming the soundcard. For example, there are many cheap mainboards that can cause problems that can really only be addressed by the mainboard manufacturers themselves. For example, the Adaptec 2940 is known to be a very critical bus controller. Chipset driver updates Actually, today's PCs won't operate remotely stable without a chipset driver update. [. . . ] The Optimal audio system is a legacy-free computer, which means that the COM/LPT/PS2 ports are not used. This can be done when you own a USB keyboard/mouse, no serial devices and of course a printer that uses an interface other than the parallel port. Undesired Software As the installation gets older and the computer is used for many things other than just audio software, it is possible that a lot of undesirable software can begin to slow down the system. We differentiate between two kinds of undesirable software: 1. Adware This type of software usually contaminates your computer when you install some strange software like P2P filesharing programs or when you click "Yes" somewhere and don't actually know what you are confirming at the moment. [. . . ]