I upgraded my lappy this year and like most people went for the very latest build . I was pleased to see my new laptop has 2 x USB3 , i thought that would be great as I suspect that the next generation of audio devices will be USB3 and for now the ports will fallback (as designed) to USB2 when an apropriate device is connected.
I was wrong!
The problem I face, is that none of my audio gear, Denon, NI, Yamaha, CME, Korg works, the device is seen and installed, but will not work in real time or work at all (any audio stream).
thats the FW and driver of the USB3 host, you may have a little utility that allows you to turn off the powersave, it shows the FW and driver ā¦ it does on mine anyway !
@stephanV - I have the latest from Dell, and even more upto date ones direct from Renesas ā¦ weird that yours works and mine doesnāt (which is the same laptop more or less).
Iāve tried using Dells own windows build, a custom build, new partition, separate drive. No matter what i try i canāt get the audio working, or midi signals to respond correctly, the other 2 USB2 ports are fine, and USB3 in the port runs okay too.
Itās just anthing that relies on realtime streaming wonāt work, it works okay with mac osx10.6.6 though, but i am not going to use a hackintosh for live gig work.
I consider myself somewhere of a PC/Laptop expert, being tech support for most of my working life, however this one has me pulling out what hair is left.
Iāll take on board anything useful anyone has to offer ..
No, nothing. Iāve tried turning off power management on the USB3.0 ports but still nothing. Seems that everything is installed fine - I can select the Audio 2 DJ WDM Audio Ch A 1|2 as default on Win 7 Sound settings but nothing will play. No system sounds upon test, nothing. The WMP progress bar doesnāt move.
you can try the latest NEC driver, which fixes loads of problems the Dells have ā¦Dells driver is months out of date.
The very latest driver is 2.1.19 ā¦you can find it on āstation driversā.
The latest FW which fixes the HD disconnection problem is FW 3028
the issues lay in which daughterboard revision you have, if like mine itās A00 then itās not going to work ā¦ever !I tried to get the latest board (A02), but they wonāt give me it.
I offered to buy it and pay their engineer to come to site and fit it (even though iām in warentee etc.) - they said no.
so all i have left is to make a formal complaint to Dell that their product itās not āfit for purpose.ā That is the spec of the USB3 ports is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. The curious thing is, the other USB2 port (not the eSata combo) is coming from the exact same chip as the USB3 ā¦ all three ports are on the same daughterboard.
Obviously Dell are saying that thereās nothing wrong with their ports, NI say theres nothing wrong with their KS4 design.
Then talking to the Dell engineer, he said he spoke to NI and NI have said the S4 will never work in USB3 ..
I wish someone would just be honest for a change ā¦ admit thereās a problem and get it fixed.
The thing is, if you have USB3 in your laptop, then it will have the NEC chip inside ā¦ itās only very recently other manufactures like VIA are building USB3 chips ..
So we know that āsomeā NEC chips are working, others are not ā¦ itās really only down to specific changes that have been done at hardware level per manufacturer.
God thought it was the only problem, I just bought my dell n4110 14r and Iāve gone crazy trying to fix this problem with usb 3.0. when someone knows something please advise I had to connect an adapter to the only light hub usb 2.0 port to work and is very annoying I have 2 denon denon sc 2000 and 1600 dnx awaiting answers greetings and thanks
I think none of the Dells will work. They insist itās NIās fault making a poor driver, however they donāt make Denonās, EMUās (my shortboard 49) or any other bit of kit I have.
They sent a semi trained chimp around to my house (gold service contract), he connected a mouse (USB 1), THAT WORKED, SO THEREFORE ALL DEVICES WORK !
Suffice to say i am not happy !
They canāt differentiate between a mouse and a complex audio device. I eventually had the daughterboard swapped out, reflashed it to the latest FW, new drivers etc ā¦ and it doesnāt work either.
I am working with only two USB ports (eSata combo = USB2), and only connect the USB3 HD to the USB3 ports, I wanted to use the eSATA for disks.
Sell the laptop and buy another brand, i understand that the ASUS laptops work okay with the same chipset.
. I was pleased to see my new laptop has 2 x USB3 
, i thought that would be great as I suspect that the next generation of audio devices will be USB3 and for now the ports will fallback (as designed) to USB2 when an apropriate device is connected.
