ASIO drivers for UA Apollo Thunderbolt not recognized in v5.19

[Alexander Fischer]

Hi,
I have REW v5.19 installed on my Windows 10 PC. My audio interface is a Universal Audio Apollo Twin MKII Duo connected on a USB-C port with a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. The installed ASIO drivers work fine with my DAW (Cubase 10) and several other stand-alone audio instruments. However, when I try to select the ASIO driver in REW it only shows the USB and Firewire options for the 'siblings' of my Thunderbolt 2 interface. No thunderbolt options selectable if 'ASIO' is selected. When I choose the Java driver option and select the Windows WDM drivers for my device, the calibration doesn't work properly. The generated sine sweep wave doesn't look right and the response measurement delivers a wrong frequency response of the audio interface (see attached screenshots). I thoroughly followed each step of the help file.

Am I doing something wrong or does REW not wortk with ASIO drivers for Thunderbolt devices? Can the 48 kHz sampling rate setting in my interface be a problem?

Thanks,
Alex

 

[John Mulcahy]

REW relies on JAsioHost to access ASIO drivers, it generally seems to work very well but I don't know if there is something different about a Thunderbolt ASIO driver that JAsioHost can't accommodate. Can't immediately think why there should be, but clearly it isn't working for you as it should.

For the WDM driver, what do you mean when you say "the generated sweep doesn't look right"?

 

[Alexander Fischer]

Hi John,
Thanks for the quick reply. I'll try to investigate if there are any known issues with the JASIOHost and Thunderbird connected devices.

To your question "what do you mean when you say "the generated sweep doesn't look right"?" - The screenshot below is how I expect the calibration sine sweep wave to look like (taken from the REW help file - even if it's displayed there for troubleshooting reasons):

This is how the "sweep" REW creates looks like in the calibration measurement result - that's definitely not a clean sine wave and the frequency is not consistently being increased (see marked sections):

The frequency response of any half-decent sound-card should look like this (taken from the REW help file):

And this is how the frequency response from my audio interface looks like (just a side note: the Apollo costs around $1500 and is used in professional studios):

If the above was the real frequency response of my interface I would immediately throw it out of the window ... without hesitation!

Any further measurements I attempt to do go south because REW doesn't seem to be doing the right thing at the very start.
As said, I am happy to do some research at my end but I would be very thankful if you could help me finding the root cause why this configuration is not working.

Here's an example of how other software lets me choose my ASIO Thunderbolt driver on exactly the same computer:

Regards,
Alex

 

[John Mulcahy]

You can see the sweep (generated and captured) on the Scope graph after a measurement - the graph only has the signals for the latest measurement. The plot you captured above is the phase trace. The response plot certainly isn't right, not suggesting it is, was just curious about your comment on the sweep.

If you look at the scope plot you may find the captured response is incomplete if there is high latency through the WDM chain. Would be evident in a big delay between Sweep and Captured on the plot. It is best to make sure the sample rate for the device in the Windows audio preferences is the same as the rate being used in REW.

 

[Alexander Fischer]

Hi John, thanks for making me aware of why the sweep doesn't look like expected. I was just thinking this had to be the sweep itself. My bad.
I double checked all settings (Windows pref, Soundcard control panel and REW) and everything is set to 48 kHz.
I'll check scope graph when I am home tonight.
Thanks!

 

[chrismeraz]

Can someone please explain how this was solved? I have a very similar problem. I don't see Apollo Thunderbolt in the REW menu and none of the other settings are working for me. I get totally weird measurements.

 

[John Mulcahy]

Hi Chris, we have been exchanging messages in your thread on Gearslutz. I don't know that this did get resolved, it may be that JAsioHost (which REW uses for ASIO interfaces) doesn't support Thunderbolt interfaces for some reason. JAsioHost was written about 10 years ago so predates Thunderbolt. It does seem possible to get a valid result with ASIO4All wrapping the Apollo WDM drivers, as your Jun1 measurement showed.

 

[Alexander Fischer]

This issue has not been resolved for me. At least not the Room EQ Wizard part of it. To be honest, I did not spend a lot more time trying with that version of REW any more and bought myself a licence of Sonarworks Reference 4 instead. I got my room measured as desired within a few minutes and am since planning to build my own room treatment.

 

[chrismeraz]

The June 1 measurement was luck - yes, I was working with ASIO4ALL, but I had to make about 15 measurements before I got one without very many clicks in the sweep. It's always been that way and it continues now even after I formatted my drive and reinstalled Windows 10.

I tried ASIO4ALL just now and it's still the same - crazy measurements, lots of clicks in the sweep (all this with a patch cable, I'm not even using a microphone).

I'd like to know why the OP screenshot shows Universal Audio Thunderbolt drivers in the drop-down menu, while mine never has. It seems important...

Oh I see your response Alexander... interesting. I'm not the only one.

 

[John Mulcahy]

As noted in the other thread, it looks like the 64-bit version of REW does support the Universal Audio Thunderbolt ASIO driver.

 

[chrismeraz]

Sorry I didn't realize there are two threads here... confusing.

I can't install the 64 bit REW. The installer tells me the JRE is corrupted (I didn't have Java installed at this stage). So I downloaded JRE separately, installed it, and restarted the computer. Then when I try to install REW, it tells me it can't find Java.

 

[John Mulcahy]

For V5.19 you have to install a 64-bit JRE (Windowsx64) from this link: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html. If you go to Java.com a 32-bit JRE will be installed. If you use the latest REW V5.20 beta it will download and install a 64-bit JRE itself.

 

[chrismeraz]

Do you know what's causing the driver to fail to load in REW?

 

[John Mulcahy]

I've only seen that if the device was not connected or some other application was using it. If the UA is set as the default device in Windows that might cause a problem, best setting something else as the Windows default input and output.

 

[chrismeraz]

It still doesn't work. I give up.

I downloaded SonarWorks and it worked perfectly the first time. It's a different tool unfortunately - it won't show the detailed results of the room analysis, it just compensates for the frequency response.

 

[John Mulcahy]

Sorry it didn't work Chris. You will still be able to see the measured frequency response with SonarWorks, most things are evident in the frequency response even if they may be easier to spot in the waterfall or spectrogram - for example, peaks in the response will have correspondingly longer decays in the waterfall, so your treatments and positioning adjustments should have visible effects in the frequency response. As far as other measuring tools go ARTA is excellent and worth trying.

 

[chrismeraz]

Here's the debug file just for kicks. Let me know if you see anything wrong that we haven't addressed already.

 

[John Mulcahy]

Looks normal. There might also be some info in the REW log files, there is one for each of the last 10 startups - their location is shown in the "About REW" dialog.