Poor Audio and Video Performance Using UD-160-A Docking Station

Discontinued Products UD-160-A
1

I recently bought a new Asus Zenbook (Ultrabook). Then, in order to enable quick set up with all my peripherals when I’m working in the office, I purchased your Plugable UD-160-A 2.0 from Amazon. When connected to the Plugable docking station, performance seems to decline in certain respects. Plugged into the docking station are: an HP w19b LCD Monitor (via a VGA cable into the VGA/DVI adapter provided), an HP printer/fax/scanner, a backup drive (WD My Passport), headphones, a set of external speakers, and am iPhone syncing cable.

The problems I’m experiencing include:

  1. When listening to music or a streaming video, sound through the headphones plugged into the docking station periodically becomes garbled - but only after 3 or 4 minutes of use. This effect seems to cycle in and out ever few minutes and ceases - at least temporarily - when I go to Sounds (in Control Panel) and select a different output device as default.

  2. When I move the cursor or page up or down on webpages, the image on my external monitor (HP w19h) pulses in and out of focus (but not on the notebook display). This effect ceases for some reason when I enter Control Panel > Appearance > Display > Resolution > Advanced Settings and make adjustments to either Refresh Rate or Color (True-32 bit; or High 16 bit). Incidentally, settings for use the external monitor include: DISPLAY: “1 | 2 Mulitple Monitors”; and Mulitple Displays: “Duplicate These Displays”.

  3. Sometimes the external HP monitor freezes or slows down and just does not keep up with my notebook PC’s monitor. Especially when watching streaming video. Perhaps its too much for the docking station to process video and audio in this situation - OR perhaps my Asus Zenbook isn’t performing well. I don’t know how to diagnose which.

Can you help ?

2

Hi Paul,

Thanks for posting your question here about our UD-160-A and your ASUS Zenbook. Let 's see if we can isolate the issues a bit and find a resolution.

First, for the Video quality, make sure that Aero is enabled. Here’s a link to the Aero troubleshooter from Microsoft:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wi…

This will find and fix many common issues with Windows and USB graphics. Do you see any improvement after running the troubleshooter?

Next try changing the “Optimize for Video” setting in the DisplayLink manager. Do you see any improvement?

For the Audio issue, I’d like know if the problem occurs on the docking station audio only. Can you plug your headphones or speakers directly into the Laptop and check if the audio is garbled there as well?

Let me know what you find, and if you have any success with the Aero troubleshooter or the optimize for video setting, and we’ll figure out next steps.

Thanks again,
Jerome.

Plugable Technologies