Focusrite Saffire Liquid 56

[derick]

Is someone using this soundcard with SCS ?
I can get only 2 channels when using WME drivers, with Asio driver no problem to get 8 outputs.

Al tough it seems stable with internal mixer and Asio, i am a bit afraid to use it that way because WME is advised for stable audio playback.

[newlifedrama]

I use the Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 and experience the same thing - WME drivers only give you 2 channels, so I use Asio drivers. The ASIO playback is pretty stable: I sometimes have problems getting things going which can often require powering the Focusrite off/on. But once SCS is up and running with the drivers everyone seems happy. When I don't reboot the machine for a long time, I think it becomes less stable. I used the setup for 11 performances a few months ago and the only glitch was my laptop froze solid 5 minutes before the opening one night, but a quick reboot, and a few prayers, solved the problem.

I had problems with very infrequent stuttering during playback - I tracked it down to disk latencies and response times, so I put all my music on an SD card to isolate it from the C: drive and preload tracks into memory which solved the problem for me. The issue seems to be that the ASIO playback buffers were fixed to around 200 msec or some small default length. And on some computers, especially laptops, disk latencies can occassionally go bizerk due to some misc. OS activity. I can provoke the problem with disk stress scripts and discovered that over 3000msec of buffering seems to cure the problem (to the point where I can't ever observe it), or using a separate disk channel ala the SD card keeps response time under 20msecs hence no problems. I see that in SCS 10.9.5 RC1 you can enlarge the ASIO buffer so I plan to test that out too. However, large buffers can also increase mixer control latencies, so beware of that.

[Mike Daniell]

I see that in SCS 10.9.5 RC1 you can enlarge the ASIO buffer so I plan to test that out too.

Please note that SCS will cap the ASIO buffer size at the 'maximum' advised by the ASIO driver. The drop-down list of buffer lengths range from 128 samples to 8192 samples, but this list is independent of ASIO driver limitations, so the real range may be smaller than that. So if you have your sound card's ASIO driver installed and you also have, say, ASIO4ALL installed, then the real range depends on which ASIO driver you use, which is determined by the outputs selected in Production Properties or Device Mapper.