Clicking sound during pink noise

[tim916]

Hi,

I've just started using the software, and it's very useful and fun to play with. However, whenever I play pink noise to set the measurement level or calibrate the spl meter I also get a high-pitched clicking sound through my speakers. Has anyone else noticed this? I am using the internal sound card on my mac Powerbook. Thanks.

[michael_98101]

I'm hearing this also.
--mj

[Chrisbee]

Not on subwoofer sweeps but when I test my speakers full range I get a horrible noise as the pitch goes higher than I can hear. A sort of tearing noise ending with a very loud chirrup. The graphs shows solid blocks of colour rather than spiky lines. I seem to have deleted all the graphs showing this effect. I do get clicks at low frequencies when I use "F follows cursor". The clicks seem to have a tempo. A quickly repeated tapping.

[Hakka]

Are you using 'subwoofer pink noise' or 'main speaker pink noise', REW lets you chose. Sub pink noise sounds really bad through the mains.

Hakka.

[Chrisbee]

Hakka wrote:

Are you using 'subwoofer pink noise' or 'main speaker pink noise', REW lets you chose. Sub pink noise sounds really bad through the mains.

Hakka.

If you were asking me... I use both.

[michael_98101]

I hear the clicking with either.
--mj

[JohnM]

Do you have the audio input and output set to Default Device? That might work a little better. The audio interface on the Mac is rather problematic at the moment, looks like I'll have to generate a Mac-specific version of the app to get around that - a shame as one of the beneftis of Java should be its cross-platform capabilities, but that relies on the various platform providers properly supporting it and Apple have chosen to go with their own audio class library rather than supporting the existing JavaSound classes.

[Hakka]

I used sub pink noise once with my mains still connected and remember it sounding pretty bad, doesn't sound like what you guys are experiencing though.

Hakka.

[Chrisbee]

I keep wondering if there is a relationship between the speed of the computer processor and USB soundcard function in REW. Though I remember somebody saying they use a very old computer for REW without problems. Laptops are usually slower than PCs anyway. I usually close all other programmes when I'm using REW just to be on the safe side.

[michael_98101]

In case this helps, I get the same clicking with two OS X machines:
1) version 4 on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo MacBook with 2GB RAM
2) version 3.29 on a 2.1GHz G5 iMac with 1.5GB RAM

As a Java developer, I sympathize with the author(s) of REW for all the problems on the Mac. We develop a Java client/server application with thousands of users that works fine on both Windows and OS X. But our product doesn't have to deal with the audio stuff that seems to be causing the problems.

--mj

[JohnM]

The clicking problem is related to the mixer Apple provide (which also has very high latency). I have been able to improve it by altering buffer sizes and some details of how the interface to the hardware is handled, but a better solution would be a half-decent mixer - happily, someone is currently beta testing one (Bob Lang at www.mandolane.co.uk, who also provides the Java Midi interface required on the Mac). That mixer greatly improves things, though the REW software needs some tweaks to work properly with it, so you can't use it just yet. Only downside is it is an output mixer only, so there is still the problem that Apple's mixer only allows access to the built-in hardware for audio input, haven't found a solution for that yet.