I paid 2,500 dollars for a faulty unit. That's all there is too it. If I were to have sent it back during the time it was covered under warranty I would have been taking the large chance (since shipping is not free to send it back) of the tech at fractal audio just might not happen to see it. Sometimes it goes days and days without having the problem and sometimes it's happening every 5 minutes.
It's a rare problem (and an intermittent one, which is the worst part) but I have isolated literally every other factor other than my house's mains power. I have changed the usb cable, used different computers with different operating systems and completely different drivers, heck I even swapped out the power cable itself. I'm a software engineer by trade and isolating variables to debug something is something I would hope I know how to do. If I can git bisect production kubernetes nodes with applications with hundreds of thousands of active users to find an obscure C++ bug, I would hope I could determine whether this problem is or isn't the axe unit. It's my unit.
@FractalAudio your statement "I use mine every day and never have this problem." argument is a
clear logical fallacy. And so is your statement that thousands of users exist that don't experience this problem. I have heavily documented every step of debugging I went through to demonstrate that there is no other external factor (again, other than the literal power supplied to my house -
I even made sure to try using different circuit breakers!). You have committed an extrapolation error by concluding that since other people don't have this problem with their unit that all people don't have this problem with their unit. I have it. It's rare and if I have to guess I'd say it's a hardware issue with the clock. Some day if it bothers me enough I may try replacing the clock on my own now that it's out of warranty.
Despite the fallacious reasoning, I completely agree with
@FractalAudio,
@The Wookie, what you described doesn't sound like what I'm experiencing. Here are my reasons for thinking that:
- My unit's issue only affects usb audio when the axe is used in standalone mode. It has not, so far as I can tell, ever affected the guitar processing.
- Although I use it more for playing than for tracking (so I could be wrong about this) I don't believe it has ever occurred during tracking. If I am recording guitars and the issue occurs it will not be printed on the the track.
- My issue is immediately affected by changing the buffer size in many cases. It happens with the largest possible buffer and with the smallest possible buffer about equally, so far as I can tell.
- I have had the issue you are describing in the past with other gear and a ground loop was my issue in that case.
As a friendly aside,
@The Wookie, the axe has a ground lift button on the back. Maybe give that a try and report back.
It's a beautiful piece of gear, I just got incredibly unlucky it seems. Edge cases do exist, and I seem to be one of them. Fractal Audio sources their parts from upstream suppliers and the upstream suppliers' quality control processes can't be
perfect. I'm stuck with it now so it is what it is.