DSP noise update / Testing shows Airwindows plug-ins might be causing my issue

[DEFMAG]

Original post is here:

DSP card gets incredibly noisy when it hits a plug-in threshold

I was working on a beat and noticed that when I add had four plugins going at once (not all on the same bus), I started hearing some noise. When I added a fifth, it start a horrible amount of scratchy noise. I tried different combinations of plugins to see if anything seemed to be the culprit, but I nothing jumped out. Once I got down to three (any combination), everything sounded fine. I decided to I see if this was project-specific, so I loaded up another one. This time I started hearing nois…

This afternoon I spent some time testing various plug-in configurations. First, I booted up the machine, where it gave me a DSP initialization error. I rebooted it and it came up fine the second try.

I have four tracks:

1: main loop (starting plug: AW Drum Slam)
3: bass (starting plug: AW Bass Drive
4: drums (starting plug: AW Matrix Verb)
5: harmony (no starting plugs enabled)

I decided to see about narrowing down the culprit(s). First, I started loading MDA plug-ins on track five. Here’s what I added:

MDA Ambience
MDA Delay
MDA Overdrive
MDA Bandisto
MDA Degrade

At this point I’ve blown past the previous threshold of three plug-ins with no issue. On track three I added

MDA Dynamics
MDA Overdrive

Still no noise issue. For fun, I added the following to track one:

MDA Dynamics
MDA Overdrive
MDA Ambience
MDA Loudness
MDA Limiter

Now I’m up to 15 plugins without issue. I then decided to add the AW Drum Slam to the drums on track four, and everything was blown out with a harsh crackling on every output but track four, which only had intermittent popping for some reason. I then turned the Drum Slam off on track one, and everything went back to normal. I added the AW AD Clip7 to track four, and immediate noise again until I disabled it.

While testing a handful of random Airwindows plugins the following cause intermittent pops on all tracks once four overall Airwindows plugs are reached:

Airwindows Drive
Airwindows Infrasonic
Airwindows Point (more popping than the previous two with the HG dither enabled)

The following random plug-in didn’t add any extra noise at all:
Airwindows HighGlossDither

It seems like I can stack any number of MDA plug-ins without issue (up to the limit, obviously) without issue. Most of the Airwindows stuff seems to have a hard cap at three before things start going south. If I add a fourth, disabling another Airwindows plugin will immediately stop the noise. Disabling MDA plugins has no effect on this noise.

Finally, I just noticed that the noise it makes is the noise I get when clicking the encoder on a plugin while the sound is playing back. It’s a pop (and sometimes a few pops that form a crackle), but cranked up to 11. I’m not sure if anyone else gets this noise or if it’s just me.

I submitted a support ticket on Friday, but I’m sure they’re currently slammed helping people and getting cards out the door, so in the meantime I decided to do collect my findings in this follow-up post both for anyone else having this issue and to be able to point to when I come up in the queue, so I don’t spam the support email.

[JCSelector]

I really hope this can be fixed, I want to use alot of AW plugins.

[MarekRosinski]

I tried a pattern with just 4 samples (bass drum, snare, bass loop, and cymbals) and had like 7 air windows plugins running on two mono and one stereo bus without issues. Didn’t max it all out to see what the threshold was though.

[DEFMAG]

I haven’t seen anyone else complain about it, so I imagine I’m an outlier and not the norm, which is typical of my luck.

[DEFMAG]

Have you encountered this issue, too? In the event that you’re still waiting on your card and are concerned in advance, you probably have nothing to worry about.

[bradholland]

Thanks for this insight.
I’ll take a look at the source code of the airwindows lv2 plugins.
It might be that they have buffers set incorrectly in them.

[dreamer]

Airwindows plugins use excessive dithering for each plugin instance, this really drives up CPU usage a lot (for extremely minimal quantization distortion reduction).

My advice for the team would be to patch Airwindows plugins to remove the dithering. This should improve the performance quite a bit.

[oldmanchompski]

I’ve definitely experienced this a lot too. It certainly depends on which plugin is used but anything with distortion or reverb definitely ramps it up a lot. Can’t even use the Live FX.

But it seems the problem has been identified so that’s good.

These plugins do sound really good (as does the MDA).