Audio playback too fast OS9/OSX

[fjelle]

Hi there!

I have a Beige G3 with the following setup:

* Power Macintosh G3 Beige Minitower
* Rev. 2 Motherboard
* Dual-boot:
1) 120GB Maxtor HDD w/Mac OS 9.2.2
2) 120GB Seagate HDD w/Mac OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar
* CPU G3@400mhz (originally G3@266 Mhz, but replaced with stock G3@400mhz CPU) - 40x40 mm fan mounted on top of heatsink.
* 1MB Cache
* RAM 768MB@100Mhz
* Personality Card - Audio/Video Card
* DVD-ROM drive
* Floppy drive
* ATI Radeon 7000 32MB video card
* D-Link DGE-528T Gigabit Ethernet card
* Adaptec DuoConnect USB/Firewire

The problem:

Audio playback is too fast. Around 10% too fast. I have tried several players but same problem. The problem is in both OS 9 and OS X. I have tried doing this:

- Changing CPU back to the stock 266 mhz CPU
- Changing RAM modules
- Changing Voltage regulator meter
- Changing to a stronger PSU
- Removing all PCI cards
- Installing Mac OS 8.6 SystemAV extension and Monitor&Sound extension to get back the possibility to change bitrate. The bitrate is 44.1, so that is OK.

Nothing helps. I'm pretty confident that is hasn't always been like this, although I haven't listened that much music before. I started noticing it yesterday when I played radio stream on my mac and the radio hosts kinda talked too fast, a bit like a chipmunk :-) At first i thought it was just me, but it seemed more and more valid.

So I investigated it further with testing different streams, MP3s and a Audio CD - same problem.

I'm kinda confused here at whats going on.

Any suggestions?

[mrhappy]

The bitrate is 44.1, so that is OK.

Don't think it is... Something is screwed up with your sampling rate... you're somehow mixing 48 and 44.1

[Protools5LEGuy]

THAT is the perfect Mac for the O.S.T. of "The Smurfs" or Melvin... 

Jokes aside, it seems like your audio card has lost some personality... 

I would try another soundcard. Most probably the clock "is seen" in Mac OS as 44.1, but behave as 48. I have never heard of a clock behaving so bad, but is plausable that the resonator or however that is called is broke.

There is the chance that the internet radio broadcast in 48k and your personality card only can do 44.1 or viceversa.

Just buy the cheapest USB sound (less than 5 bucks) card and try. MacTron had a post about a cheap USB stick Mac OS 9 compatible.

OFFTOPIC

Any suggestions?

Forget Jaguar.  Why Jaguar? I see little point in Panther just because Digi001 and AM III (old pci Protools LE hardware) support it. Protools 6 LE is superior to 5 LE in workflow

[fjelle]

Thank you for your replies 

I forgot to mention that I tried with another personality card - also with same issue.

The solution here and now is that I plugged in a USB DAC and use that as my sound card. This, however, works pretty well.

From what I understand of your ideas and the things I could stumble upon on Google, the ROM perhaps saved the sample rate wrongly although showing it as 44.1. I did find 2 people with exact same problem. One person decided in the end to change mother board and the other one got lucky with just changing personality card, but eventually the problem came back and therefore it was concluded that the personality card slot was flaky and that the weight on this slot is kinda too heavy and may eventually not make good enough contact.

A friend of mine also suggested to set the rate at 22khz and reboot, then set it again at 44.1khz and reboot again. Haven't tried it yet, but will do that later. The idea was to "reset" the ROM.

Can it really be true that it's possible via the OS, be it 9 og X, to save something in the hardware and thereby make such a fault?

[nanopico]

If the ROM is saving it, it would be in the NVRAM. 
Not sure if it helps at all, but have you tried reseting that?

I have seen issues where something stored in NVRAM doesn't get updated properly unless you reset the NVRAM and then it works correctly again.

If you tried that already, then I'm at a loss.