Tips: If your Audio 6 MK2 starts "knocking"...

ShelLuser

Hi gang!

Editorial

This is an utterly dumb story but whatever, I figured I'd share anyway because I hope it might be able to help out some random reader.

Within the world of Unix, and basically ICT in general, there's a golden saying: "If it isn't broke, don't fix it!", a philosophy I usually follow. To a certain degree of course, some things need to be 'fixed' aka updated even though nothing has broke, think about virus scanner definitions and the likes. And sometimes things can break without you knowing, thus... installing updates for your operating system is usually also a very good idea.

But everything else? When a new update for Live, Max, Maschine, FL Studio or Reaper comes out then I usually wait a few weeks before upgrading. And when it comes to drivers and firmware and such then I'm quite stubborn: if it isn't broke...

And then my Audio 6 "broke"

When I first got my Komplete Audio 6 Mk2 (awesome audio interface IMO!) I had a rough start: it wouldn't work with the official ASIO drivers, but Asio4All did work. Something I wasn't too happy about because although Asio4All is an impressive project I'd rather use the official drivers with less "overhead". There was also the problem of not being able to apply firmware updates because my interface wasn't recognized.

I managed to fix this by 'resetting' the whole thing in Windows and grabbing the most recent updates from Native Instruments' drivers website, this was approx. 1 - 2.5 years ago. After that I left things as they were.

Stradivari Violin

So I was messing around with a Komplete + iZotope setup (as shown above) when all of a sudden I heard some kind of "knocking" sound. Not an audio stutter perse but it sounded like, well, knocking? "tick, tick, tick...".

Please don't laugh too hard but at first I wondered if this might be something new and specific for the Stradivari? Perhaps it was custom to knock on the wood when playing certain notes? 🤔 I know this wasn't a thing before, but maybe this slipped in with a recent update?

But because this didn't sound all that impressive to me I started looking for a setting to turn it off! Which of course I never found. 🙄

Then I decided to rule out possible causes and I changed the audio driver from Komplete's ASIO to FL Studio ASIO. Lo and behold: they were no longer knockin' on heavens door, errr: the violin. Yet now I was using my PC's build-in audio interface, not the Mk2 I paid good money for! 😶 Surely the Mk2 should be better than this?

Updating the driver (and firmware)!

So yeah... if you have similar experiences with the Komplete Audio 6 Mk2 on Windows then now might a good time to update your driver & firmware if you haven't already 😏

I have no idea what could have caused all this but my theory is that because Windows 10 kept getting updates over the past years my drivers eventually ran into issues as well, thus... weird sounds started to occur.

So... for the record: my ASIO driver is now on version 5.22.0, and my firmware sits at 0.3.6.

If yours has lower numbers then yeah.. I would definitely recommend that you consider updating as well. Just to make sure "they" don't come knocking on your instruments 😄

As mentioned, you can find the latest drivers on NI's drivers website.