Hi there,
I just had an interesting experience trying to achieve complex ASIO routing on my windows machine and I wanted to share it with everyone.
I had many ASIO devices in my time. From Creative EMU chips in Sound Blaster cards, via Yamaha/Steinberg and such. A year ago, I bought my latest ASIO hardware: Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 2nd gen
And that one worked kind of OK, not achieving very low latencies, but generally working correctly.
Until I tried to do ANY operation involving ASIO chaining. When I say ASIO chaining, I mean ReaRouteASIO or Rewire or Voicemeeter. There is this specific situation where one audio program needs to sit on the ASIO driver, but then, some other program needs to slave via ASIO to that first program. This is where Focusrite miserably failed. And I was lucky enough to catch the culprit and have a solution at hand.
So, it turns out, not all ASIO drivers are born equal.
And there are two levels to this thing: first: running alone and second: running in a chain.
There I was with my Focusrite pulling my hear out why oh why can't I successfully connect two ASIO programs. I mean, they would connect, but I would always get crackling noise, no matter which buffer size I set.
Then Vincent Burel explained in
his forum post here, that these problems all come from badly written ASIO drivers. Then I remembered that, about 10 years ago, I bought Centrance Mic Port Pro exactly because of excellent ASIO drivers that accompanied it. So, I gave it a try and ALL of my crackling problems are now gone.
I am not writing this to try to convey that Focusrite is bad and Centrance is good. I don't care about any of them. I'm just trying to convey my surprise when I discovered that there is one more, mostly hidden, layer to ASIO drivers quality.
So, the bottom line is: not all audio and crackling problems are due to CPU and DAWs. Until recently I believed ASIO is just ASIO. What more there is to it. But now I learned my lesson. There is home level ASIO, and then, there is pro level ASIO. And which one is which - you will have to test for yourself.
I know that everyone is saying that RME has superior ASIO drivers, but RME has always been too expensive for me.
You can read about
this whole story here.
Cheers!