5.1 surround sound, audio dropouts and stuttering

essami schrieb am 05.01.2016 um 18:25 Uhr

Hi!

I'm trying to get my studio computer to handle 5.1. surround sound but it's performing terribly. The audio dropouts and stuttering is constant even at max latency settings and with only a few audio tracks.

There's no problems with stereo playback even with as many as 100 audio tracks. We are running a an mp4 video file to sync foley, mix dialogue etc.

I'm wondering if this can be fixed with some settings or am I just expecting too much from my computer?

Dell T5500
12 GB RAM
SSD 120GB for OS, WD AV-GP WD20EURX 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB for media
Intel Xeon E5645
Nvidia Quadro 4000
Windows 7 Professional - 64bit with Vegas Pro 12

My audio card is the Hammerfall DSP 9652 with analogue I/O boards for 8 channels input and output.

Any thoughts on how to improve the performance or is the computer just too slow?

Thanks!

Kommentare

astar schrieb am 05.01.2016 um 23:33 Uhr

For test reasons, I would try and uninstall the DSP card, and re-enable the onboard card and set it up for 5.1 output. Then see if you have the same playback issues. This would test for a driver issue.

If you can switch to the other card, you can try that too. However, for a dedicated sound card like yours, I would have disabled the onboard card in Bios.

essami schrieb am 06.01.2016 um 21:34 Uhr

Thanks for the suggestion! I do have the onboard card disabled in BIOS. At the moment I can't risk doing your exact test as we are in the middle of recording this week.

What I did though was I created a routing system where I create 3 audio busses in Vegas. I then route trehe busses to different outputs in the Hammerfall. Ie. master outputs to 1/2, bus 1 outputs to 3/4 and so forth, no problems!

Unfortunately this is not a workaround for creating a 5.1 mix for our film... But does it tell me something? I'm not very techy but it does seem weird this type of output to 6 channels would work fine but 5.1 project would struggle...

astar schrieb am 06.01.2016 um 22:15 Uhr

I have not done a lot of 5.1 mixing in Vegas, but I pretty much thought that was the way it worked anyways. Pro codecs have multiple audio channels for that very reason. Even AC3 is just a multi-track MP3 file vs 2 channel standard MP3.

Whatever codec you are rendering to, you will need to make sure you channels are rendering to the correct channels in the codec. There should be a section in the help file on outputting multi-channel audio.