My OWL arrived today and i immediately started to play around with it. The first thing i noticed is that the sound was not right. Its a little noisy and dull, not much but audible but the most distracting part is that it is full of glitches or digital artefacts. Most of the delay presets like ‘Simple Delay’ have some kind of digital distortion in the wet part. I am using firmware OWL Rev04-004 (177|262272). Is this a known bug?
How are you powering it? I wonder if you are not giving it enough juice (500 ma)…
If you want to know what the patches should sound like:
http://hoxtonowl.com/patches-2/patch-library/
Hi d3b5s3r. I am using USB power from my mac or a power adapter with 9V/2A. No difference there. I wrote a simple test-patch that just copies the in-buffer to the out-buffer and that is distortion free. I’ll post more samples on soundcloud today.
Nice photos!
How have you connected the pedal? The input is made to match a guitar, so it’s very high impedance. It should be fine for line level e.g. the output from a computer, but if you use a mic you should have a simple transformer or pre-amp in between.
The output can drive headphones but not very well: the sound will be low and muddled. Much better to plug into an amp or mixer, or the line level input of a computer.
Apart from that, try changing the input sensitivity. Digital artefacts usually result from having very low input levels (near the noise floor) or very high (clipping). Oh and try the Faust SmoothDelay. It sounds much better than the SimpleDelay!
My setup is guitar -> owl -> audio interface -> mac -> ableton live.
The “Faust SmoothDelay” artefacts are very similar to the “Simple Delay” artefacts. In fact every delay factory preset that i’ve used has some kind of glitches.
The first chord is the bypassed sound. The second chord is the owl sound.
What do you have the input setting set at?
That would answer the question wether it is related to clipping or not.
Which preset do you have loaded in the second slot?
Both presets run at the same time even though you only hear one, it could be that the second preset is causing the first one to distort.
If neither of these things work there’s something wrong with your unit I would say.
Ok. I did record a screen capture movie to show d3b5s3r my Owl settings and after fiddling about i found the cause of the noise problem. Somehow the noise has something to do with the new “Remote Control” feature. Take a look.
I wonder if you have a bad potentiometer in your pedal, when you go from remote control to the pedals I assume the pot value is what is used at that point. I’ll try and see if the same thing happens for me.
I just confirmed the behavior and the same thing is happening for me. Distorted when plugged into the USB, OwlNest running and Remote Control turned off.
Thanks d3b5s3r. Good to know. Is there a faster communication channel with hoxtonowl?
Hi guys,
Some of us are away for a few days but we will get back to you asap!
I am looking if there is any regression in the firmware code that handles knobs / remote control.
Thanks
Giom
The discrepancy appears to be due to noise on the parameter value readings. There’s a known problem with the MCU (see STM32F4 Errata: Internal noise impacting the ADC accuracy) which we’ve tried to work around by smoothing the parameter values. This solution might not have been perfect, we’re investigating now and will try to come up with an improvement.
Issue updated: Giom’s solution seems to work well!
Pushed to OwlWare / master; we will incorporate this in the next firmware release.
Thanks Stiwi!
I can confirm that the patch works great. Thank you very much.
I’m having the same problem with pure data delay patches. Turning remote control off doesn’t fix the problem.
Any suggestions on a way to smooth the ADC? I tried a low-pass filter, but it didn’t do anything.
Hi Mike,
so turning Remote Control ‘on’ doesn’t change anything? Then it is unlikely to be ADC noise. Have you got a link to the patch?
Patch is here: https://hoxtonowl.com/patch-library/patch/BasicDelay
CloudDelay, also written in PureData, has the same problem for me.
Hi Mike - have you tried other patches in the library, and does the patch glitch on your laptop?
It could be that you need some smoothing with [line~] between the input and the [delread~].
Hope I’ve understood the problem, sorry if not!
Adam
Ya, almost every patch works! It’s just the delay patches that are written in Pure Data that have the issue. Delay patches written in other languages work fine.
It works fine on the online simulation of the patch. And I can hear that the dry signal is coming through clean, so it must be something to do with how pure data stores into the OWL’s memory?
Not sure how I would go about using [line~]? It’s for volume ramps, no?