no sound out of some internal zones today

[duncan]

my ms4h has been working very well until today when i (didnt) wake up because the alarm didnt sound

this morning, 7 of the 8 zones on 1 of the usb sound cards wouldnt produce any sound, oddly the 4th zone still worked fine
also the single the zone on the 2nd usb sound card still worked fine

loxone and squeezebox showed that music was playing on the silent zones, and all functions appeared to work properly but no audio
ive excluded the amp by listening to the usb outputs using some headphones - confirmed no audio output

i restarted the music server - no difference
i swapped around the usb sound cards and resaved them - no difference
finally i swapped the usb sound cards from usb ports 1 and 3 to 2 and 4 then resaved the sound cards - now its all working again

the only recent thing different is that my ms4h server now gets powered off at night and is woken by the QTp output of the alarm clock 3 minutes before the alarm
but this has been the setup for over a week and this morning it was the first time things didnt work fully

ive restarted the system loads of times today and it works correctly every time

any ideas how i avoid this in the future?

[hismastersvoice]

Not sure what sound cards you use, if C-Media-Chipset (Logilink/CSL etc) I have seen this two times in may years of testing at my test-systems.
The sound card hangs up and only physically unplug of the card or unplug of the system power. Restart is not enough, the usb-cards gets energy also in standby.

I use on my productive system ESI HD+ sound cards, and didn't see such an issue.
Honestly I don't set my Server to sleep every night, the power consumption is with 4.x W in idle low enough.

I guess the only thing the helps is to disconnect the power of your server while sleep.

[duncan]

yes im using c-media so that must be it - thanks for the advice
my server runs on a pc and takes about 15w idle

ill think about swapping to a different chipset - i was looking for something usb 3 ideally anyway
the esi hd+ has been superceded now, i guess the esi gigaport ex will work just as well?

[hismastersvoice]

The ex works well, but is not the cheapest one.
This cards sounds for me much more better than C-Media.