I've been using an Echo Audiofire 8 for the past 10 odd years and I recently upgraded my main studio machine to Windows 10. Cubase 5 is having major asio spike issues with only a couple of audio tracks and a couple of vsts active (which typically wouldn't even show on the asio performance monitor). The spikes are happening when the track isn't even playing. I'm unable to play any of my main projects with dozens of tracks/vsts which were working perfectly fine on my Windows 7 machine. The problem is mostly invariant to the buffer size (it reduces marginally when I increase the buffer size significantly, but there's still clearly an underlying issue).

I've tried using the Echo Audio Fire asio drivers in cubase as well as Asios4All. Using the latter makes no difference to the asio spikes.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Do Windows 10 and the old Echo soundcards just not play well together?

Thanks

Updates: Have so far tried the following-

Audio priority is set to boost and that makes no difference.

Have tried starting cubase without any vsts initalised (i.e. removed the .dlls from the vst folder) which made no difference.

Have tried running the audio files from a different hard drive just to check the hdd wasn't causing the issue, made no difference.

Below is a link to a screenshot (I don't have permission to enter images) of Echo's firewire analyzer + the VST Performance bar from cubase. This screenshot was taken while playback was stopped, and as can be seen the asio bar is at about 50%. This track was tiny and had something like 3 audio tracks and a couple of synth vsts opened. I'm not clear how to interpret the readings from the firewire analyzer.

https://imgur.com/a/reYscq2

Well don't I feel like a moron. I spent a whole day trying to figure this out. I'm aware I'm answering my own question but posting this in case anyone else stumbles across the issue.

Apparently Windows10 is defaulted to minimize energy consumption? Anyway, I went and changed the energy plan to "high performance". I've had no issues since.

I actually got the suggestion from this ableton advice page

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/ar...dows-for-Audio