5.1 surround sound, audio dropouts and stuttering

essami wrote on 1/5/2016, 11:25 AM

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!

Comments

astar wrote on 1/5/2016, 4:33 PM

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 wrote on 1/6/2016, 2:34 PM

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 wrote on 1/6/2016, 3:15 PM

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.