In order to test your MONTAGE USB connection properly, eliminate the Hub and the MX-1 (?)
Connect the MONTAGE directly to your computer via a single USB cable... and make sure you have the proper driver installed for your computer type and operating system.

When you connect the MONTAGE the top line of the screen should have the USB icon glowing blue. Let us know.

Ok some more detail ... I only connected the Montage to MX-1 to prove no output from Montage as the MX-1 USB connection was fine, I'm using the Montage with Ableton 10. With nothing else running when I start Ableton it sees the Montage fine for the first 8 minutes of use, then drops the USB connection, The Montage driver has been removed and reinstalled several times and the USB connector does show blue on the screen, but once its gone dead nothing I do seems to re establish the USB connection with the Montage. The MIDI ports in Ableton will all then show as red in colour showing its lost connection. If I then unplug the USB cable and re insert it .. the connection gets re established again for another 30 seconds or so before dropping again. At first I wondered if my PC was shutting down a USB resource, but Ive checked all of these in the device manager and cant find any fault here either ?

What is an MX-1?

Can you do what I asked...? Connect the MONTAGE direct to the computer, no MX-1 (whatever that is), no hub. Can you successfully communicate with the MONTAGE?

The MONTAGE USB ‘To Host’ should only be connected to a computer, period. No hubs, no MX-1(?)
You should use the “Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver” for your computer Operating System. This handles 3 Ports of MIDI and makes the MONTAGE a 32-In/6-Out audio interface for your computer.

If you don’t want to use the MONTAGE as audio interface, you can use just the USB-MIDI via the USB cable. If you are using another audio interface, connect the MONTAGE Main L&R analog Outputs to your audio interface... and follow directions for setting up your audio interface of choice.

The Montage is always connected directly to the computer, I only used the MX 1 mixer to prove a point ! ..... Ive noticed a message in the Montage driver properties box 'events' tab which says 'device not migrated' after device install request,(me installing the driver) whether thats significant or not ? I have also removed my mother boards audio drivers to keep things simple and any other unused usb devices and re installed the yamaha drivers again .. I'm wondering if theres a driver resource conflict somehow, I'm trying a different USB port at the moment as well.. i'll see how this goes

The Montage is always connected directly to the computer, I only used the MX 1 mixer to prove a point !

Forgive me, since I didn’t know what it is, I don’t know what point you were/are trying to prove. The USB “To Host” port on your MONTAGE can connect to a computer (Mac or PC) when you use the Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver, or it can be connected to an iOS device (iPad or iPhone) using the class compliant setup. Connecting it to anything else only proves, you probably shouldn’t... whatever it is, it will not support the MONTAGE.

What a “hub” does with the MONTAGE 32 audio bus outs and 6 audio bus returns (without using the driver) is a wildcard... so again, not really clear on your configuration. Certainly, the MX-1 is not looking for this... As I read through it again, am I now to conclude the MX-1 is not connected to the MONTAGE via USB?
_ Do not connect MONTAGE via USB to anything other than a proper HOST device (computer or iOS device)
_ Do not connect it via a Hub when troubleshooting its operation.

Hope that helps.

Not having a Mac - I'm not too familiar with that environment. But if you have a Windows environment, you can completely remove the Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver and your Montage should still be recognized using the class-compliant built-in drivers. You would first uninstall the Yamaha Steinberg USB Driver then reboot Windows. Make sure your Montage isn't plugged into your Windows PC through USB at this point. Then plug in the USB cable. This should be a USB 2.0 cable aka "printer cable" from the old days and connect to the "USB TO HOST" port on Montage and any free USB port on your PC.

The above suggestion to remove the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver isn't one that makes Ableton work at full potential. You'll be missing a lot of audio channels using the class compliant driver. The reason to do this is to see if you loose a connection (USB to Montage) within a few minutes like you see with the Yamaha Steinberg USB drivers installed. If you still see this kind of problem - then the theory of driver conflict would (probably) not be appropriate. Not that built-in drivers couldn't have some kind of "conflict" - but I would say it's very unlikely and would probably start looking at something else. Changing ports on my PC. Maybe trying to plug Montage into different PCs to see if all PCs have the same issue with your Montage. If another PC is fine - then you can say perhaps the Montage doesn't have a problem - but maybe there's something wrong with either your main PC's hardware or the software configuration. Really, this is trying to eliminate Montage as a possible problem (with its port).

Note that other users have had problems with cables but I see you've already tried swapping out cables.

Hi Guys thanks for all your help so far .. I think I have this one sorted (hopefully) . I chose a gaming motherboard when I built my PC last year, as it has about 13 USB direct connectors on the motherboard .. giving me better latency ... however several of them use different standards 2.0, 3.0 and the unheard of (to me anyway, USB 3.1 type a ) .. Mostly this isnt a problem as most drivers seem to be able work with either, and all my other gear is testament to that, however, as I cant see clearly to the back of my PC .. I'd plugged the Montage into the only 3.1 port on the board, which clearly the driver wasnt able to cope with, because the yamaha driver pre dated the 3.1 standard I would assume ...

Starting any other resource such as a youtube clip was shutting down the Yamaha connection through this port as the motherboards internal signal routing took priority I found .. trouble was.. finding the sequnce of events

Its not unusual for a PC platform to fail to load a driver from time to time, or a program not to see a connection, I'm used to that but, this problem was a little more difficult..albeit simple enough.. anyway I hope this info will help some other soul, if the same thing happens to them ! thanks again folks 🙂

Since Montage is USB 2.0, there is no benefit to using a USB 3.0 (or 3.1) port and best to leave those free for true USB 3.0+ transactions. USB 3.x is supposed to be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 so it should have worked - although you may have needed to go into your BIOS setup and be sure somehow legacy support wasn't disabled or other configuration would render USB 2.0 devices (on the USB 3.x) broken. Given you have USB 2.0 ports - it's just easier to plug Montage directly into one of those.

USB tends to be an area in computers where there is incompatibility. Even Microsoft Surface since Surface Pro 4 has suffered from incompatibilities with certain peripheral USB controllers requiring "hacks" to the chipset registers. I think primarily this is a Microsoft BIOS initialization issue for this example as other hardware using the same chipset works fine (already having set the register to prevent this particular bug).

USB is tricky and filled with pitfalls on all sides. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something goofed with your motherboard's BIOS (either setup you can control or initialization settings you cannot) or hardware implementation that caused this issue.

Glad you got this sorted.

Problem Not Solved! Has to be a windows 10/steinberg yamaha issue .. my Ableton 10 setup works fine for a while then the Montage loses its USB connection .. all my other USB gear works without fault and some of it is older than the montage , all latest software installed in all my gear and O/s getting frustrated now 🙁

Something far-fetched: you may want to check the power-save options for the USB port and turn those off.

Something far-fetched: you may want to check the power-save options for the USB port and turn those off.

Thanks Jason but I'm well past that stage ! even the ableton guys havent been able to help so far .. why is it only the montage is with the problem is what I dont get ?

Personally I dont think it is 'it' per se .. but its trying to share a resource that something else on my system is hogging .. we used to call them IRQ's .. I just cant find it

I'm not sure what the details of your build are - but gaming machine and building your own system fires up a couple red flags. Only because I don't know the details of your hardware - it's open to the world of possibilities. And a gaming machine with a screaming video card isn't exactly music friendly. No music software requires the shading and dedicated processing that game machines use. So it's excess fat that a music machine build would not have. I'm not saying that removing your video card and going with embedded will fix everything - just that it's not the best starting point for a PC dedicated for music. And perhaps some would say PCs can do more - so swiss-army-knife it and do music plus games plus GPU floating point scientific calculations plus ... That's fine if it works. A music PC doesn't require much and I've always used pre-built with great success. Nothing fancy. Mainstream, not bleeding edge, not top bin, etc. Yes PCI SSD (faster sample I/O from/to disk) - but that's about what dictates the rest for me.

Not saying there isn't a solution to issue(s) using the same hardware you have. Start to disable everything you don't need for the DAW. Non-embedded video card, anything else. Dial down what you can in the BIOS. "Simplify" the setup. Maybe take out PCI cards you don't use for the DAW. Bare minimum. See if that fixes anything. If it doesn't - and you're bare bones - then this hardware jettison isn't going to help anything. If it does help - start adding things until you break. Then take out the 2nd to last thing you added leaving the "breaking" hardware and see if it's still broken - or just you added "too much". That sort of thing.

It's not something I'd personally want to dink with much. I'd probably spend a couple hundred on a pre-built (low-end) desktop and call that my interim music machine and slowly dink with the game machine over time. Meantime getting past these issues with the interim machine.

Ok sorry I havent reported back for a while .. because Ive been testing my latest settings and was waiting to see some stable results .. @ Jason >> its just a gaming centric motherboard I built my system on .. I dont use my machine for gaming and it doesnt have any great graphics capability... remember of course, everything has worked fine for a year since I built it !! .. its just recently something changed ?

So Ive done Bios upgrades, after the problem emerged.. not thinking they would have caused any negative effects on the music side but cured nothing .. and as you said Jason .. I just started dis-abling some features last week prioritising on USB functionality ofcourse .. so I disabled all the modern 3.1a support and critically .. I changed the settings from legacy USB support from 'yes' to 'Auto' ? . The Motherboard is an Asus Hero Crosshair VI a pretty modern board with an 8 core Ryzen processor .. all Audio and on board hardware was disabled long ago .. and it seems .. and I say this with my fingers crossed to be working ok now ? .. Not really sure why this happened I think a windows update has messed with USB settings. The Yamaha driver is still showing as 'not migrated' in the driver settings box, but ableton 10 has not lost its USB connection to the Montage in the last 2 days of use ? Thats as stable as Ive had it since starting this post .. I'll report back on anything else, or at least to confirm everything still stable in a while