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?

 

[feeef]

Coming back to that topic as I gave another go to the G4 card in combination with the SATA card (both Sonnet) on the 9500. I realized after reading the documentation (who would do that? ) that the sudden crashes came from the fact that the HD drivers were too old. I used the ones from System 7. I now use the drivers v8.1.4 from the Mac OS 9 install CD and everything works fine!

The SATA card needs to be on one of the bottom PCI slots as they have their own PCI bus. No audio problem anymore.

 

[obsolete]

Wow, 11.5 years later! Good work, thanks for posting your solution

 

[BeniD82]

Bet that problem's been bugging him for that long of a time too

 

[feeef]

I just didn't use the G4 card for 11 years, which let me attach the SATA card on the bottom PCI slots, and recently, I decided that it was a shame having it in its box and gave it another try. This time, I read the documentation and installed it correctly.

There was also a very interesting chapter about installing Mac OS 9 the right way with a G4 upgrade. Altivec optimizations are only installed if the G4 CPU is detected. Therefore, you have to install the OS, then install the Sonnet drivers and reboot. Once the G4 upgrade is correctly loaded, re-install the core system on top of the existing install. This lets Mac OS 9 install its own Altivec optimizations.