hi.
i've got a very strange issue, just wanting to run it through some people to see if anybody's seen this before, before i start lining my walls with tinfoil. i'm not joking.
i'm running xp. of the soundcards in the machine, two are of importance: an alesis 16 channel firewire mixer and an m-audio delta 3296 that connects over good old pci. my main daw is cubase sx 3. yes, it's all very old. it works just fine. i'm going to need to move up to 64 bit one day to access more ram, but that day does not appear to be on the horizon.
a few weeks ago, i installed a windows codec pack in an attempt to get firefox to natively read flac over ogg. i misread the documentation; that's impossible. it shouldn't be impossible, but so be it. i had previously identified this as the root of the problem, but i've recently been backing away from that.
basically, i'm getting random tone issues out of both of these cards over all interfaces: asio, wdm and kmixer. from time to time, it actually sounds "correct". but, then it randomly modulates between being floored by the subbass and being cut around 2000 Hz. it happens in cubase over asio. it happens in foobar over wdm and through the kmixer.
this afternoon, i was finally able to isolate something specific, but this is such a fleeting problem that it's possible that it could change in a few hours, or have already changed.
imagine this..
you have a snare. it's a closed snare. it's just one hit. you put that snare hit on repeat in cubase. after about two minutes, that closed snare sounds like an open snare. so, you reset your drivers - and you get the closed snare again. two minutes later, it's an open snare again. and, this is repeatable through all of the following signal paths:
1) cubase-->asio-->alesis
2) cubase--->asio--->m-audio
3) foobar--->wdm--->alesis
4) foobar--->kmixer--->m-audio
i've tried driver reinstalls. i've tried an os reinstall. i've swapped every cord you can imagine. i've swapped out amps. consistency seems unobtainable.
is it time to line the walls with foil? does anybody have a better idea?
