essential 61 loses communication

[veloci3]

Arturia Essential 61
Windows 10
Cubase 10.5
Analog Lab 4


I have been unsuccessful in solving a connection issue and have run the Arturia tech support gauntlet among exchanging my keyboard with a new one from Sweetwater Music.

Symptom:
The keyboard loses playability if left idle for 5 minutes.  Also once it loses playability closing and starting programs will not fix this.  A computer restart is necessary.  Sometimes even 2 consecutive restarts are needed.

Even though the keyboard keys don't work the onscreen computer keys do.  The lights and display on the keyboard appear to be working correctly.


I was hoping somebody could help

I have my USB power savings disabled.


*also what is up with all these verification questions on this forum?

[LBH]

Hi and welcome to Arturia forums.

Do you use a Windows power saving plan or do you run in High Performance mode?
Are you sure you have disabled each of your USB hubs in Windows Device Manager, so they don't shut down?
Your PC should not sleep in any way. It's okay, if your screen turn off after a while.

[veloci3]

usb power saving is off in both the device manager location for all USB's and in the power options area (I have a Dell XPS 8700 3.4Ghz 8G ram and 1TB Samsung SSD)

The power plan is set to high performance.

while typing this I was getting a strange distant hum out of my PA system so I unplugged my Arturia and it went away.  I plugged in a different USB cable and the problem is now solved.

I was using a HOSA 3M long USB cable and even though it is new it is shot.  I have no luck with any cables by HOSA to the point where I threw out a bunch of instrument cables because they were so noisy.

So the solution to my issue is a bad USB cable.  It took 30 days of pain and suffering to finally get to this point!!

[LBH]

Yes that was my next suggestion to test.
Actually it's allways a good idea to test different cables and different USB ports with issues like this.

Good it's solved.

Cheers

[LilHossBigJake]

I also was getting, I will call it chatter, and drop outs on my 61 essential especially when it went into Vegas mode.

After all the prescribed checks, I found an old power supply and plugged it in. This solved the noise problem as well as intermittent drop outs.

Just a note for anyone with the same issue or looking into buying one. The chatter or hum isn't isolated to this board. The Roland boutique synths are notorious for this. It is a USB issue.

I also think that this controller is taxing the USB port power. I do not know for sure, but it has been much happier since I wall powered it. The power supply jack is requesting a 0.5A supply which is about the limit of USB 2.0 as I have been led to believe. 

Barry

 

[gphantom]

One way to find out how many amps your device(s) use, is to go into control panel, select device manager then look for Universal Serial Bus Controllers and select one of the USB Root Hub listed, click on POWER to find the device and look at the amount of power it's using.  For example , my Keylab Essential 49 uses 100ma and identifies as USB Compliant Device.
My Keystep uses the same 100ma.

At least you'll know how much power you're using.  Also, in the header of the USB root hub, you'll see how much power is available to all ports in that particular hub.  If the hub supports 5 devices and you have 4 ports using 100ma, the 5th would be borderline.  If that's the case, you could try another hub on your motherboard.  Most newer motherboards provide for a lot of hubs but many are not connected internally.  You could connect a USB extension to one of the available ports on the motherboard and bring it out of the computer to attach your controller.  Might help.