USB is at the heart of most PC‑based studios. But what do you do when it goes wrong?
The Universal Serial Bus — USB for short — may have become the most ubiquitous connection standard found in everyday use. Since its creation almost three decades ago, and over four generations, it has been implemented within many electronic devices we take for granted in everyday life. Each successive generation has increased bandwidth and, in many cases, power delivery. At the same time, they have all been designed to offer backwards compatibility with previous generations, making USB devices from different eras as interchangeable as possible (at least on paper). However, things can still go wrong, and, depending on the situation, there are various steps you can take to help rectify the problem. Let us take a look at the different ways we can approach USB issues on Windows machines.
Starting with the hardware connection, the worst‑case scenario is that you plug in a USB device and the PC switches off or subsequently refuses to switch on. In this case, you should check for physical damage. Look inside the USB port itself, as this symptom may be the result of the pins inside the socket being bent out of alignment, causing the system to short out when the USB cable pushes them further together.
If you plug the device into a known working USB port and the system fails to detect that you have done so (no new item appears within the Windows Device Manager), then we would tend to expect either a connection or physical issue which may lie outside of the system.
The first step would be to try an alternative USB port, preferably switching from the rear to the front (or vice versa) of the computer where possible. The rear ports are generally native to the system chipset, whilst the front ports tend to be supplied via third‑party controllers, often resulting in differing behaviour between the two sets. You may also find a couple of USB 2.0 ports on the rear of the system, as many mainboards still ship with a dedicated pair, to help maintain support for particularly picky older hardware.
Power Move
Switching out the USB cable itself, and testing on a second computer, are both steps that could help you to narrow down where the problem lies. Upon connection, if you receive a Windows warning stating “unknown USB device needs more power than the port can supply” and the device has the option to add its own power source, then now is the ideal time to double‑check that it is connected and powering the unit as required. Power delivery is also a good reason to avoid USB hubs without their own dedicated power source, as USB hubs powered solely by the PC connection will be limited to dividing up one port’s worth of power across however many hub‑connected devices are in use.
However, if you only have an unpowered hub to work with, it’s worth noting that newer USB generations offer improved power delivery. For example, the USB 2.0 specification allows hosts to deliver a total power output of 2.5 Watts, whereas USB 3.0 and 3.1 allow for a total of 4.5W, and the latest USB 4.0 standard increases this to a potential 240W delivery when EPR or Extended Power Range functionality is implemented. So, simply switching over to a newer‑generation port may help resolve issues with power delivery.
As well as dividing data bandwidth, unpowered USB hubs also share only a single port’s worth of power between all the devices connected to them. If power delivery is an issue, try connecting unpowered hubs to newer‑gen USB ports on your computer, as these tend to have increased power capacity.
Cable length should also be a consideration. To achieve the best performance, both USB 1 and 2 had recommended maximum cable lengths of 5 metres. This dropped to 3m with USB 3.0, and USB 4.0 lowered the limit again, with the older Gen 2 (20Gbps) running at its best with cables up to 2m and the latest Gen 3 (40Gbps) implementation listing just under a metre at 80cm.
This isn’t to say a longer cable won’t work, but you can expect a potential degradation in the speed of the transfer and an overall loss of performance. Cables longer than the recommended length may not present a problem for some less demanding devices, but if you’re experiencing problems, you should make sure to check the charging wattage rating and supported USB data rate when troubleshooting. A longer‑than‑advised USB‑C charging cable, for instance, may still provide enough data capability to allow for it to function as a USB 2.0‑grade connection, offering a 480Mbps transfer rate and more restricted feature set. If you have the need to go further beyond the advised lengths then boosted active cables, or adaptors to convert the signal to run over optical or Ethernet cables, are common solutions to ensure you have stable data transfer over longer distances.
If an error appears to tell you that your USB device isn’t receiving enough power, be sure you’ve connected its power supply.
Drivers
By this point, the USB device you’re troubleshooting should be showing up in the Windows Device Manager. If this is still not the case, the next step would be to check over your USB controller drivers. Windows, when first installed, includes many of the common component drivers and these can prove handy for getting up and running quickly. After installation, Windows Update Service may then update these further, bringing them up to the latest WHQL Microsoft‑approved release, but you may find even newer drivers from other sources that include further bug fixes and updates. The first port of call is often the support pages of your motherboard supplier, where the USB drivers tend to be included within the chipset driver package; if there is a secondary USB controller on the mainboard, you will be able to quickly identify this by looking through the drivers on offer.
Although they are a good starting point, the drivers found here may still not be the most recent. If updating to the most recently available from the board manufacturer fails to resolve the issue, the very latest builds will be available from the chipset supplier, normally available directly from either Intel or AMD’s own websites depending on which platform your system is built around.
Windows treats each USB port as its own entity, and you will find that unplugging and reconnecting a USB device into a different port will cause Windows to reload the driver to support the new connection.
You may find that the controller is showing up within the Device Manager, but displaying an exclamation mark and noting that the device cannot start due to conflict or lack of resources. Alternatively, you may be seeing devices randomly disconnecting in use as the system reassigns internal resources. Windows treats each USB port as its own entity, and you will find that unplugging and reconnecting a USB device into a different port will cause Windows to reload the driver to support the new connection. Whilst Windows should clean up after itself, it is possible for multiple driver instances to clash and cause devices to mis‑detect or lose connection.
When you connect a USB device to a new port, Windows will duplicate the existing driver, and these duplicates can sometimes interfere with proper operation. To see the duplicates, go to Device Manager and select ‘Show hidden devices’.
To resolve this, you can enter Windows Device Manager, select ‘Show hidden devices’ and manually remove ghosted entries or other older devices that are no longer required. This can take a little digging around if done manually, and I find that the superb third‑party tool USBDeview (www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html) can quickly round up all the entries for you to review in a simple‑to‑use application. Some older drivers like the Korg MIDI Driver observe a legacy restriction whereby Windows could only handle 10 connected MIDI devices. This limit has been long since been lifted within the OS itself, but when working with certain kit that uses older drivers, ghosted device entries can stop this hardware from working. You may find you can get it working again by disconnecting all of your USB hardware (other than the most essential items like keyboard and mouse) and then running through the remaining USB entries and removing them all. Once done, you can then plug the devices back in one at a time, allowing Windows to reinstall the drivers once more from its repository whilst ensuring all of the prior entries have been cleaned out.
The freeware USBDeview shows in‑depth information on all of your connected USB devices.
Power Mad
Disabling the ‘USB selective suspend’ option in Power Settings will prevent Windows from attempting to power down your devices in the middle of a DAW session!One final USB tweak can be found within your system power options. If you open up the Windows Control Panel and select Power Options, the best general advice for any audio system is to run the Windows High Performance power scheme as a starting point. However, some further tweaks can still be applied, and crucially for USB support, there is a USB Settings section with the option of ‘USB selective suspend setting’, which should be set to Disabled. This stops the OS from attempting to power down connected devices when power saving, avoiding any potential device re‑detection issues while your DAW is running.
USB’s ease of connectivity has long been a key strength, and the ability to route it even over other standards like Thunderbolt is part of the appeal. Starting with the appearance of USB 4.0 we see the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 within the standard, along with the ability to further add Thunderbolt 4 support at the manufacturer’s discretion. Support needs to be added within the BIOS, meaning full functionality is still offered on a board‑by‑board basis, but this does appear to be an avenue for Thunderbolt to more widely spread across the PC platform as the two standards continue to converge.
Optimising Your USB Layout
Not all USB ports are equal! Different generations of USB port are often colour‑coded, with black showing USB 2.0, blue denoting USB 3.0, and red indicating USB 3.1 Gen2.Take a look at the connection choices on any modern PC and you’ll likely find an assortment of differing USB ports on offer. The classic flat rectangular USB Type‑A port has been around right from the start, from USB 1.0 through to the introduction of USB 3.2 almost two decades later. Whilst not a requirement of the standard, it’s fairly common to see these ports with colour‑coded innards to help denote the level of USB supported by the socket.
The original white USB 1.0 sockets were only found for a couple of years in the late ’90s, being superseded in the year 2000 by the black USB 2.0 port, which remains the oldest USB standard still found on new systems today. With a transfer rate of 480Mbps and the lowest power delivery rating, it makes sense to use these ports for relatively undemanding hardware. The bandwidth on offer will be more than adequate for most simple devices, but a total power delivery of 2.5W best fits your least power‑hungry devices. Your computer keyboard and mouse are obvious candidates as well as devices like security dongles, basic MIDI devices like trigger pads and smaller keyboards, or smaller audio interfaces. Many larger and more feature‑rich devices may still prove relatively untaxing for the data transfer capabilities of USB 2.0, although in those instances an additional PSU may be required to power the device.
USB 3.0 ports may be indicated by blue innards, along with teal‑coloured USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports. Both of these offer 5Gbps transfer rates and 4.5W of power delivery. A third variant, USB 3.1 Gen 2, is indicated by red ports and maintains the 4.5W power delivery rating but raises the transfer rate to 10Gbps. With all of the USB 3.x options, the extra power may help to provide extra functionality; for example, an audio interface might offer a better headphone amp or phantom powering on more of its inputs, whilst a well‑featured MIDI controller may have its own display screen functionality. The available bandwidth and power delivery also make this a suitable choice for connecting up external SSDs or running a hub that can take advantage of the extra USB 3.0 resources.
In recent years USB‑C adoption has been spreading. This newer port can support various flavours of USB itself, depending upon the hardware revision. Starting initially with USB 3.1 and supporting a potential 100W, in later revisions we have seen devices capable of supporting the USB‑C PD update, which raises this to 240W. USB 3.2 over USB Type‑C itself comes in three revisions, from 5Gbps through 10Gpbs to 20Gpbs, along with the latest USB 4.0 standard running at either 20Gbps or 40Gbps. These increases in both power and data delivery further open up the scope to allow you to run multiple monitors directly off a single USB port, connect a hub with a selection of power‑hungry or bandwidth‑demanding devices, or take advantage of fast external NVMe drive storage.
Indeed, it’s more general hardware like storage or display screens where the very latest USB variants tend to offer the most advantages. MIDI in itself is a very lightweight protocol, and in terms of bandwidth handling, even USB 2.0 can deliver the support required for most small recording setups. Ultimately, most devices will be rated to a given standard to support their features, and these requirements should be observed to ensure full functionality.