i've got my FireBox up and running on my PowerBook G4 1.5GHz with the included Cubase LE. Plug and play, minimal setup. Almost all is good.

Only one thing now. There is an awful lot of hiss and coming through the headphones with direct monitoring and playback.

i thought that digital recording is supposed to be clean, except for the clipping that can occur.

Any thoughts or advice on how to minimize the hiss?

Thanks

Is the hiss in the headphones only or in the recorded files?
From the developer part of the install CD/DVD, install the CHUD tools, you'll have a processor prefpanel, there disable "nap" it may help. But it may not be sufficient.

The hiss is only in the phones...recording sounds clean.

I cannot locate a developer part of CHUD tools on my LE SD ...

But monitoring through the phone io quite noisy..

CHUD tools are part of the developer tools on the OS X install CD/DVD (sorry for the misunderstanding)

Where are connected the headphones, directly on the powerbook?

Thanks..after unchecking the NAP in CHUD, the noise did reduce significantly, although there is still some hiss/noise when headphones are plugged into the FireBox, but at least it isn't unbearable.

what exactly is happening when you make the 'nap' change?
how else does it effect your system?

just wondering

I couldn't tell you. Just that it reduced the headphone hiss. As far as i can tell, it did not affect anything else.

The "nap" is an energy saving feature embedded in the CPU, when not used, parts of the CPU are sent to sleep (hence nap) and so they use less power. Unfortunately, it's also a common hiss source.

S0, I bought a Firefox and had the whine issue. I returned it. Then I learned about the NAP issue. So I installed CHUD and went back and tried a new (different) Firebox. It worked perfectly... WITHOUT messing with NAP.

So, was it the Firebox I got the first time? The firewire cable? Or is it just chance?

Frankly, I love my firebox now. But I can't tell you if the NAP thing is always the solution or if it is, indeed, the root of the problem.

My new Firebox is quiet and sounds great with my G4 Powerbook (1.67 GHz).

CP

This post has been edited by ColdPack: Fri 3 Mar 2006, 15:47