USB Power and Impact

Impact Knowledge Base

The Impact line of DAW controllers are designed to receive power via USB. The exception being the LX88/LX88+ which also has the option of being powered by a 9v power supply.

Even in the case of the LX88/LX88+ a typical setup involves connecting Impact directly to a USB port on your computer using the supplied cable. This connection powers the device and sends data to and from your computer. With that said, we have encountered some cases where the USB ports that are built into computers don’t provide consistent power to bus powered devices and in some case don’t even follow USB power spec. These USB power problems can lead to a number of strange behaviors such as:


  • Device is recognized by the computer but not the host application (Reason, Cubase, Logic, Bitwig Studio and other applications compatible with USB MIDI devices).
  • Loss of communication with host application (keys stop working, display updates when moving controls but software does not respond).
  • Performance that deteriorates over a period of a few minutes or hours.
  • Parameter values changing when controls are not being moved.

Solutions

We have found that in many cases, simply trying a different USB cable or USB port will help.

In other cases, we recommend connecting Impact through a powered USB hub (particularly when using a laptop). To be clear, Impact will not work with a standard passive USB hub, only USB hubs which provide their own external power supply are recommended.

This is an example of a powered hub that we have tested extensively: Plugable USB 2.0 10-Port High Speed Hub

If you have tried these solutions and you continue to encounter problems, please contact support.