Case study — 11 hours, multiple full services, 0 I/O resets

11 hours. In production, every service.
0 DAW I/O resets.

A house of worship runs live multitrack capture and livestream off a Mac. Keel is now their production audio device — every service, week after week — on a real 48-channel rig into PreSonus Studio One: −1 ppm clock accuracy over an 11-hour run, with the DAW never losing its inputs or outputs.

0I/O resets — the device never dropped, in or out

11 hcontinuous run, no interruptions

48 chmirrored 1:1, bit-for-bit

−1 ppmclock drift across the full run

All numbers are from measured Keel bridge-health logs on the real rig — not estimates.

At a glance

Who	A church running weekly live multitrack capture + livestream off a Mac.
Rig	48-channel Klark Teknik front end (AES50 from a Behringer Wing) → Mac mini → PreSonus Studio One; Focusrite Scarlett for playback.
Problem	When an interface dropped or re-enumerated, Studio One lost its input and output mapping — 48 channels to rebuild plus the playback routing, often minutes before going live.
With Keel	−1 ppm clock accuracy over 11 hours; multiple full services livestreamed with 0 DAW I/O resets — inputs and outputs held the whole time.

Who

A church running weekly live multitrack capture + livestream off a Mac.

Rig

48-channel Klark Teknik front end (AES50 from a Behringer Wing) → Mac mini → PreSonus Studio One; Focusrite Scarlett for playback.

Problem

When an interface dropped or re-enumerated, Studio One lost its input and output mapping — 48 channels to rebuild plus the playback routing, often minutes before going live.

With Keel

−1 ppm clock accuracy over 11 hours; multiple full services livestreamed with 0 DAW I/O resets — inputs and outputs held the whole time.

The problem

This team records and livestreams every service as 48 discrete channels in Studio One. Their pain wasn't sound quality — it was stability under real conditions. The triggers were maddeningly small: unplugging headphones from the Scarlett's headphone jack, nudging a USB cable behind the rack, even touching the Ethernet run into the Klark Teknik DN9630. Any one of them could make Core Audio drop and re-add the device, and Studio One would lose its carefully-built routing — the 48-channel input-to-track mapping and the playback outputs alike. Rebuilding that is slow and error-prone — and it tended to happen right before the room filled up.

For a volunteer-run booth on a Sunday timeline, "the interface blinked and now the DAW is broken" is the worst-case scenario.

The setup with Keel

They pointed Studio One at Keel devices instead of the interfaces directly. Keel mirrors each interface 1:1 — same channels, bit-for-bit, on the interface's own clock — and presents one steady device that stays put no matter what the hardware does. Nothing else in their workflow changed.

What we measured

Over a continuous 11-hour run (a full service plus setup and idle), from Keel's own health logging:

Clock accuracy: −1 ppm drift. Across 11 hours the virtual device stayed locked to the hardware clock — effectively perfect. No slow drift accumulating over the run.
The live service window: effectively flawless. A ~2-hour fully-clean stretch, a completely clean hour, and only brief, sub-audible buffer blips totaling a fraction of a second — front-loaded into the first few minutes.
No interruptions to the DAW. Zero overruns, 0 I/O resets across the entire run. Studio One held its inputs and outputs the whole time.
Survived disconnect/reconnect. Interfaces came and went during setup; the DAW's input and output mapping never moved.

The headline isn't a number — it's that the operator never had to touch the routing. The rig behaved, while they did everything else.

Why I built Keel

"This was my own rig. Studio One would reset its I/O over the smallest things — unplugging headphones from the Focusrite Scarlett, nudging a USB cable, even touching the Ethernet run into our Klark Teknik DN9630. Every time, 48 channels came unassigned — sometimes minutes before we went live, sometimes mid-program with the stream running.

I couldn't find a tool that just kept the device present, so I built one.

With Keel in front of the interface, it stopped.

Set it once. Forget it's there."

— Florin Holhos, maker of Keel Audio (FOH & livestream engineer)

The same failure mode, everywhere

This story happens to be a church, but the problem isn't a church problem — it's a Mac problem. Any rig that points a DAW at a hardware interface can hit the same wall: Core Audio re-enumerates the device, and the DAW dumps its input and output mapping. In a live room that costs you the show; in a studio it costs you the take. Live events, broadcast, livestream production, recording and project studios — Keel is the same fix in every one of them: one steady device that stays put so the DAW never loses the thread.

11 hours. In production, every service.0 DAW I/O resets.