Helix Clock Sync with Infinity Looper

[hal3001]

I have a bit of an odd issue.  First, I should say that both the Helix and looper are running the most recent firmware.  I've had my Helix for about a year and I've used it exclusively since I bought it.

 

Like most people, I'm not a huge fan of the slightly unforgiving built-in looper but it was just fine for practice but I've recently been wanting to use a looper more for composition recently and having a few more features would be useful so I picked up an Infinity Looper and a Beatbuddy (I'm still waiting to receive the BB).  I received the looper last weekend and have been reading the manual and just getting generally acquainted with it and ran into a bit of a weird issue.  When I connect the looper to the Helix, set the Helix to send midi clock after a few seconds everything seems to sync up just fine.  I can send commands correctly to arm/play/etc just fine as well.  However, if I try to edit any MIDI controls on the Helix (scrolling through channels, or CC values) but not sending any messages, the looper will start to speed up or slow down pretty dramatically.  I also noticed, that if I setup a button with a CC command that doesn't do anything or put it on a channel that the looper isn't receiving on, and start to tap that button to send the message very quickly the same thing occurs.  In some cases, I only have to send it once and it will go all over the place.

 

I did read in the looper's manual that it's slaved clock sync function will detect a change in clock, and slowly attempt to shift toward the new clock timing until it is in sync again (while still trying to keep the running loop at the correct speed), so my assumption is that the editing and or excessive (or not so excessive in some cases) MIDI messages being sent is some how taking up processing time on the unit causing it to delay the clock messages but I have no easy way to confirm this.  I guess I could write a MIDI sniffer log the messages but I figured that would be overkill.  

 

I tried a few things to debug this and one of which was to disable sending clock from the Helix just to confirm that somehow CC messages weren't being sent (to possible trigger Varispeed) as I was making edits (but not triggering them) and everything worked perfectly. 

 

Has anyone else experienced this or have any other things I could try to enable/disable in order to test this?  My only other option is to send clock from the BB once it get's here but I would prefer to just have Helix -> BB -> Infinity instead of BB -> Thru Box (Helix, Infinity)

[hal3001]

Looks like something is definitely wonky.  I hooked it up to the BeatBuddy I ordered which has a BPM on the display and disabled sending all MIDI except for clock all I have to do is turn the right selector knob and the BPM on the BeatBuddy goes all over the place.