JOE WALLACE: I’m Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com, and in our last look at the Lexicon Omega, we plugged a guitar cable directly into the instrument input which feeds into Line 3 on the front of the Lexicon, and we recorded a few tracks. Now we’re going to take a look at troubleshooting one of the initial problems you might have with the Lexicon Omega and Cubase LE, and that’s the buffers on the PC.

[JOE WALLACE RECORDING A TRACK IN CUBASE LE USING THE LEXICON OMEGA]

Now unfortunately in this example, you can’t hear it too well but there’s a definite crackling going on, and the culprit here is having your buffer settings not adjusted properly. Basically, the faster your computer’s hard drive and CPU, the lower you’re able to set your buffer settings without getting that crackling or even audio dropouts, and the way to fix that is to go back into devices and device setup. We’re going to click on VST multitrack again but this time we’re going to click on the control panel button. Now you see the ASIO control panel and there’s a slider that adjusts the buffer size and that’s on the top there, and the bottom slider is the number of buffers. What you got to do is basically adjust your buffer size, make it a little higher, and see what happens, and if you’re still getting the crackling, make it a little higher still.

Now the question is why do you want to have a low number on your buffer? And the basic reason for that is you want to cut the latency in your input signal down as much as humanly possible, and the amount of latency depends on the amount of buffers assigned in your ASIO control panel. It’s true that when you install Cubase and the Lexicon Omega signal that the buffers are set automatically to a safe level for your machine, but once you start doing things with VST plugins and using input monitoring and things like that, your buffer issues are going to change and so there is going to be some tweaking involved, and basically you’re just going to have to experiment, make a tweak, go back, check it in your timeline in the DAW and see if you’re still getting crackling and then shift back and adjust if you’re still having some issues with the buffer settings.

And that’s basically it. In our next edition, we will explore more with Cubase and the Lexicon Omega. I’m Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com.