Strange issue I have been having with my unit.. no sound in certain scenes randomly

[Hatata]

Hear me out .. I know this sounds weird

So this has happened to me across multiple firmware revisions. Net new presets. After factory resets and all kinds of trouble shooting steps. I have been talking to support and they want me to send the unit back but just wanted to verify I am not insane and missing something.

So at random times I will turn on my unit.. I will get no sound. I will switch scenes and get audio. Then I will switch back to another Scene and no output. If I do NOTHING on the scene with no output but sit there and strum my guitar for 30 seconds or so sounds will suddenly cut in with no intervention from myself. Other times I cannot get sound at all from certain scenes until I have switched back and forth or power cycled the unit.

Am I missing something easy here?

I eliminated my audio interface by swapping it out with another one and the problem still arises.

 

[KenR]

You’ve probably checked this, but have you tried multiple guitar cables and different guitars? What you’re describing could be caused by an intermittent open in either the cable or guitar wiring.

Just a thought.

 

[Hatata]

You’ve probably checked this, but have you tried multiple guitar cables and different guitars? What you’re describing could be caused by an intermittent open in either the cable or guitar wiring.

Just a thought.

Thanks for the reply .. I have.. I am trying to see if creating presets from templates that were created under an older firmware revision could be the source of some of my issues. I will likely ship it to support. Just trying to cover all my bases before I pay the cost of shipping which is quite high where I am.

 

[Brian Coonan]

This is probably a big shot in the dark - but have you checked the noise gate on the input block just to make sure it’s not set to something really odd?

 

[Greg Ferguson]

So at random times I will turn on my unit.. I will get no sound. I will switch scenes and get audio. Then I will switch back to another Scene and no output. If I do NOTHING on the scene with no output but sit there and strum my guitar for 30 seconds or so sounds will suddenly cut in with no intervention from myself. Other times I cannot get sound at all from certain scenes until I have switched back and forth or power cycled the unit.

This REALLY sounds like the scenes are triggering a CPU overload. Sound cutting out is an expected symptom of that.

Remember, the CPU readout is an average of CPU activity, so it could either be barely above and below, or it could be wildly above and below the displayed value. And, just like on a desktop or laptop computer, when the CPU is pushed too hard, it’ll eventually catch up, if we’re patient enough. In the modeler, if the load isn’t too much I’d expect that it’d be overloaded and go silent, then catch up and be(have) normally and the sound output be restored.

It’s also human nature to wait a short while then hit the power button and restart the machine, whether it is a computer or the modeler. At that point it will not be stressed so it’ll behave until that scene or special condition reoccurs and it can’t keep up and the problem starts all over again.

What happens if you switch to the factory presets, maybe the first one, switch through scenes, then move back and forth through the first bank of presets? They should all be well within the CPU limits. If the system stands up to a couple hours playing around with those that will definitely be an important datapoint.

 

[Hatata]

@Greg Ferguson would you have cycles to look at my presets and tell me what you think? I only have 2. Just see if anything seems off? CPU is sitting at ~44%. Is there anything about the Input Gate or the one at the end of the chain that strikes you as problematic ?

 

[JoKeR III]

Just tried your presets, power cycled on/off a couple of times, switched scenes several times and didn't experience any audio cut out. Have you tried headphones directly plugged into the Axe III? When the audio cuts out, do either the INPUT 1 or OUTPUT 1 meters indicate any signal?

 

[Brewce]

I am trying to see if creating presets from templates that were created under an older firmware revision could be the source of some of my issues.

I saw that question. I consider it very unlikely as there obviously is intention to have best possible backwards compatibility. If there is an exception we would undoubtedly receive clear warning.
Exceptions could be a yet undiscovered bug, or maybe when a block had some necessary radical changes.

 

[Hatata]

Just tried your presets, power cycled on/off a couple of times, switched scenes several times and didn't experience any audio cut out. Have you tried headphones directly plugged into the Axe III? When the audio cuts out, do either the INPUT 1 or OUTPUT 1 meters indicate any signal?

Good call I will try that.. didn’t think to plug headphones in.

 

[Hatata]

@Greg Ferguson @JoKeR III I believe I figured out the root cause of the issue. Even tough I swapped Audio Interfaces I still used the same model. Clarett+ 8pre. @JoKeR III your suggestion to use Headphones was the key to figuring out what's going on. When I encountered no sound I plugged Headphones in to the AxeFX and I could hear my guitar just fine. So I power cycled the interface only for Audio to come through as soon as it rebooted. So that helped me narrow down my trouble shooting just to the interface/drivers/windows now. That got me thinking .. What if something is causing the USB port to go into a power saving state.. and its taking a very specific sort of signal to try to make it through to the interface and wakes it up. As this normally happens after the interface has been sitting idle.

So I turned off every power saving setting in the BIOS and Device Manager I could find. I normally can replicate the issue multiple times a day. Its been 2 days now and it has not happened at all. I also found an optimization guide from Focusrite that alludes to these kind of issues caused by power saving states.

https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Optimising-Windows-for-Audio

Hope this helps someone else. I am going to say this is fixed for now !

 

[Dave Merrill]

Glad you got it sorted.

I've had similar happen, with no audio coming through the Focusrite 2i2 I use for normal computer (non-music) sound. Happens a lot when the computer hasn't been used in a while. My workaround has been to just unplug and replug the interface, which works. But recently I think I may finally have turned off enough levels of auto sleep power saving that it hasn't happened in a while.