9500 With SATA card sound problem

[feeef]

Hi,

As this is my first post on the forum, I will first introduce myself :

My name is François, I am 33 and I am from France. I am a Mac fan since I'm a kid and I have a small collection of macs including 68Ks, PPCs (old / new) and an Intel mac.

There is one mac that I still use almost everyday which is a 9500/132 Upgraded with a G4 700MHz card, a SATA controller running a 60GB SSD drive and 576MB of interleaved RAM. This mac can boot 7.6.1, 9.1 and 10.4.11

I mainly use 7.6.1 because it is extremely fast on this machine and has the applications I need. The system is installed on an internal SCSI drive and I store files on the SSD drive.

The thing is that I have problems with sound when playing MP3s or videos when stored on my SATA drive. On the video, the image is really smooth (even in DV format 720x576 @ 25fps) but the sound doesn't work well at all. MP3's are also not playing well from the SSD. No problem at all when stored on the SCSI drive though.

I first thought that the problem was due to the slow bus on that machine, but I have a partition with OS X on the SSD and with MPlayer I can play an .avi DivX with no problem at all (video + sound). However I cannot play any MP3 from tiger (even with MPlayer).

I think this is strange... isn't the DivX requiring more resources than the MP3?

Has anyone ever had this problem?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[Unknown_K]

There has always been an issue with the PCI bus of the 8x00 and 9x00 PCI powermacs and PCI add in cards for hard drives.

 

[Byrd]

Welcome!

Which slot is your PCI SATA card installed in? Try rearranging it in a lower slot from the top. Could also be an issue with the audio format used in your DV videos. Have you tried a later OS - eg. OS 9?

 

[feeef]

Thanks a lot for your quick answers!

The audio format is not a problem because no audio at all can be played from the SSD. I tried many different video formats including mpeg 1 and quicktime video which work well on the SCSI drive.

The SATA card is on the top (highest) PCI slot so I will try moving it down to a lower one. There are 6 slots so I will try them all and let you know how it goes!

 

[feeef]

Well,

I tried all 6 PCI slots and the result is the same with the 3 top slots. If I use the 3 bottom slots, the sound starts to be working ok but the computer freezes after a few seconds. It could be something wrong with my motherboard, or, as Unknown_K suggested, it is probably the issue with PCI in the 8x00 and 9x00 powermacs.

It's a bit frustrating because I feel that my computer has enough power to do great things like video editing (even with 640x480 files) but my SCSI drive is not fast/big enough and the SSD has this bug with audio. It's too bad.

It is still a pretty good machine for graphic design though (which was it's first purpose)!

Thanks for your help anyway!

 

[Unknown_K]

Years ago when I first got a Sonnet G3-400 and ATA-66 PCI card for my 8500 I had those stuttering issues with audio, Sonnet came out with a utility to slow something down on the PCI IDE card so it went away.

I think the designers for the SATA Mac cards were targeting G3/G4 machines which don't have the same issues as the old PCI macs did.

 

[feeef]

Ok! That would explain some strange behaviors :

I just installed 7.6.1 on the SSD (not using the SCSI Drive anymore) and wen I play an MP3s it is too fast then stops then plays too fast...

Do you know if this utility still exists for my card and is downloadable somewhere?

 

[Byrd]

The SSD also sounds like a possible problem; what happens with OS 9 on a SCSI HD, with no SSD or SATA card installed?

 

[feeef]

Everything works fine with only the SCSI drive under OS 9 and OS 7. However, my goal was to get the best out of the SATA card. So I was looking for a solution to make it work perfectly.

I tried with a normal SATA drive (7200rpm) and the result was the same.

I need some room to be able to boot Mac OS X and store some files for backup. SATA drives are not too expensive so it's perfect for that and, actually, OS X works quite well on the SSD. I am able to play DivX files but no MP3.

Playing MP3s or videos from the bigger drive under OS 9 or OS 7 is a nice to have of course!

FYI, on my 9500 the SCSI drive scores 11 on XBench (read/write speed) while the normal SATA drive scores about 30 and the SSD a bit more than 60.

 

[Byrd]

Apart from the usual card shuffling, trying another firmware etc, your best bet might be another SATA card - definately an incompatibility somewhere.

 

[feeef]

Do you mean getting a SATA card from a different brand?