A complete beginners adventures with the Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 and Sonar X1

I ordered a Presonus Audiobox 44 VSL today for $274. I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah... that looks much nicer than that other Pre Sonus you were looking at. Definitely let us know how it works out.

Beepster - fun to read through your sojourn here. I have two of the Focusrite Scarlett 18i6s. So pleased with the first one (which I've loaded up with cables) that I bought a second one for when I roam around and just want to have a quick connect. It's worked like a charm for me. I appreciate the ADAT input, which has allowed me to send in 8 additional inputs from a ProFire 2626. The sound is really crystal clean. I didn't have a single issue or bit of confusion in the install process. I did decide to pick up from a hardware store a remote power switch for the plug. The one annoyance I have is that there's no on off switch for the unit. So for the unit I have that has all the inputs loaded and doesn't move I've attached this remote switch plug to it so I can turn it on and off easily without reaching behind a bunch of wires to unhook the power. With that in place I've been a happy camper with the unit and relish the sound.

Ha! I actually just asked you a question in the other thread so I'll post it here after this. It really does seem to be a really great little device but yes I would have preferred a power switch on it but I guess they had their reasons for not including one. I'll re-post my original question so anyone watching this thread can see the answer. Thanks for popping in.

From the other thread: Hi, lawajawa. I see from your specs you have an M-Audio device hooked up to the 18i6 to take advantage of the extra channels via the optical connection. I'm curious as to how difficult it was to get that set up and what kind of results you are getting. I have the 18i6 and thought I might be stuck purchasing their OctoPre interface if I wanted to expand without a mixer so if there are other options I'd love to explore them. Thanks.

Also you say you have two 18i6s. Is it possible to daisy chain them or alternatively use them simultaneously via separate USB ports? I'm about to turn in for the night so sorry if I don't reply until tomorrow. Cheers.

Beepster - I don't see how the daisy chaining idea would work. The Scarlett MixControl is all set up to handle the one unit, as well as the ADAT inputs but it doesn't have a UI design to accommodate daisy chaining a like unit. I get great results from the ADAT input. It's just like having 8 more inputs in the back (all through this one tiny ADAT plug), and the MixControl UI is fantastic for quickly mixing to suit your ears for monitoring. Sonar X1 is all ready to handle the additional 8 inputs, so you've got 18 inputs to choose from to route to your audio track input. This has made it very convenient for me to have multiple external midi sound devices. I can call up sounds from all over the place (not to mention the internal soft synth stuff) and it flows in as needed. My one other comment is that I've been using the Line 6 KB37 for recording guitar tracks. I prefer how the KB37 has virtually no latency while I play live and put down tracks even loaded with all the sounds from either Pod Farm or Guitar Rig 5. Compared to the Focusrite Scarlett, I've found that the guitar input experience is much sharper through the KB37. But in contrast to that, I've found that all of the other audio inputs I want - external midi audio inputs, and microphones etc. have superior clarity through the Focusrite Scarlett 18i6. Sonar X1 is great, it enables me to easily toggle between the two audio devices as needed.

Thanks for the reply, lawajawa. Very cool stuff. Yanno now I'm starting to wonder about using the Layla as an input expansion. They CAN be daisy chained to each other using the optical connector in kind of a slave/master type scenario. I wonder if it would work with the 18i6. hmmm...

Ok Beepster, I've got my Presonus Audiobox 44 VSL running at 24bit 48 khz 64 buffers. Roundtrip latency is 4.7 ms! I'm thrilled.

That is SLICK, dude. Good stuff. Currently I am screwing around with other things (WHAT DID THOSE PEOPLE DO TO MY POOR P-BASS?!!))) so nothing much to report at this point.

BTW in regards to the optical input stuff Matt from Focusrite said this in another thread in case ya'll missed it...


"Glad to hear you are all enjoying using your Scarletts and Saffires with X1.
Beepster: In regards to your question about using the optical input with the 18i6, you should be able to use it with any device that has an ADAT optical output. The only thing you have to do is plugin the lightpipe cable to both devices and set your Sync source in MixControl to ADAT. You will want to set the device sending the optical output to internal clocking. It really is that easy.
Matt Pliskin // Focusrite Technical Support"

Hooray!

And by "Hooray!" I mean my Layla does indeed have an optical out so I think I might be able to use it to take advantage of the extra 8 analog ins on the Layla. Whether I can use the phantom power on the mic pres... well I guess I'll just have to experiment. So the moral of the story is... Hooray!

That would be pretty cool if it works out that way. Let us know when you get back to it.

Okay... so I'm trying an instrument track for the first time (gonna try to record a bass line) and I wanted to use multi input 1. I inserted an audio track in X1, clicked the output menu and selected the Focusrite left channel 1 (not exactly what it said but that's not my point). When I did that the "Instr." LEDs on the front of the box lit up red for the first time... both of them. Just trying to keep with my thorough description. Cheers.

Actually I forgot that I opened MixControl and switched 1 and 2 to Inst (instead of Line) and that is what made the LEDs turn on. When I switch either one back to line the corresponding LED turns off.

I'm super tired now but I just managed to get a bass track recorded. Despite a busted up pickup and a complete lack of any kind of tweaking aside from adjusting the trim knob and setting MixControl channel 1 to "Instr" I got an AWESOME sound. Super clean, crisp, full and loud... just from plugging straight into the front of the 18i6 with my Mexi P. I did not hear ANY latency at all and I have not changed the buffer settings from my last report (it's set at 10ms and I was getting something silly like 30ms roundtrip) so perhaps it was set to zero latency monitoring or I just don't hear that kind of latency. Either way I am quite happy with the results. Cheers and good night.

Okay... so that was a little bit understated. I needed to put away my gear and get some dinner going. When I say it sounded good I mean it sounded GOOOOOOOD. Like I was playing through an old Ampeg fridge dialed into to it's cleanest, most present sound. I was really worried about how I would deal with my bass tracks and thought I would have to buy an amp or screw around with sims forever but from my ears it was spot, freaking, on. And all I did was plug straight into the Scarlett. Granted I did just put new strings on the bass so that probably helped but I used to try a direct in on my Layla through the multi pres with the exact same bass (when the pickup wasn't mangled too) and it was flat and cruddy sounding. I recorded an album and ran my bass through my Line 6 head to get a cleaner tone which worked well enough but that was GARBAGE compared to this. Even after tons of post EQing and adding effects and whatever it was GARBAGE compared to this. So yes indeed a basic Instr. input through the multi pres smokes some considerable butt at least in regards to recording bass. Can't wait to see what it will do for my guitar sound... and, if I ever get up to it again, some vocals. Cheers.

So...   Hi-Z = 
 

Does the scarlett come with any amp simulation software like my line 6 ux-1 did? Something like pod farm perhaps?

No amp Sims. Just compressor, gate, EQ and reverb plugs. I didn't use any of that for the bass track.

Well, I ordered the 18i6...  and it's all your fault, Beepster.  
 

AWESOME!! Lemme know how you like it.

I should have it towards the end of next week.   
 

Okay... just taking a little break now and thought I'd make a report on latency stuff. So it turns out last night I was indeed using the Zero Latency Monitoring function in MixControl for my bass track. After some wrestling with MixControl and X1 I got the Scarlett to monitor from X1. As I said earlier I left everything at default settings which was the 10ms setting in the "Settings" popup. It was reporting something silly like 50ms roundtrip at the time. I forget and I'm not going back to check. So now that I was hearing the bass being monitored from the X1 I was indeed hearing some of that latency. It was crazy but it was enough to bother me and probably effect a performance. So I opened up the "Settings" drop down in MixControl and pushed the fader to 4.0ms. This caused an engine stop in X1 (oops... I guess I should have closed X1 first). After I restarted X1 and reloaded my project all was good. If I REALLY strain to hear any latency I guess I can but it's pretty much right there. X1 is reporting Input: 9.0 msec, 398 samples Output: 13.0 msec, 575 samples Total Roundtrip: 22.1 msec. Obviously that isn't ultra low latency but I still have two more increments on my buffer knob (I'm not messing with that tonight though because I'm happy with the latency I'm getting). I have recorded and played back my project and there are no clicks or pops and the bass still sounds awesome. Hope that helps some.

BTW this signal is SUPER strong. I've got my trim knob on the unit turned almost completely off and had to pull my track fader in X1 WAY down and was still getting a super powerful signal. Sounds great. I can't wait to try out some of the included effects.

Thanks for all your ramblings Beepster. I'm using the QUAD-CAPTURE myself, but I'm pretty new to using external sound cards, and I'm finding some of your accounts quite useful.

Glad you've found it helpful, synkrotron. That's what I was hoping for with all this. When I first started looking at all the new modern interfaces it was very intimidating and confusing so I figured if I just put it all out there others like myself might find some meaning beyond all the technobabble. Cheers.

Anyway I wanted to make a quick report on latency results. The other night I plugged in my guitar to get some leads happening over top of the blues bass track I recorded. At the 4ms setting which Sonar was reporting a 22.1 roundtrip latency for I did actually start to hear an ever so slight delay. So I dropped it down to the 2ms setting and the delay pretty much disappeared. Again if I REALLY strained to hear a delay I could but it was really insignificant. Sonar reported just a little over 12ms roundtrip latency at this setting and again there were no audible pops, clicks or dropouts after recording or during playback. So that's pretty good. Not amazing but pretty good. I do have one more increment on the buffer fader (1ms) so I'd imagine if I switched to that I'd likely get around 6-7ms roundtrip latency. Certainly not the 2ms some devices get but those units generally cost a lot more. As far as the dry sound of the guitar it wasn't quite as impressive as the bass (a little flatter) but that might just be my pickups. I'll probably get much better results from my ART300 with the chrome humbuckers. I have not tried out the mic pres yet but that will be happening soon. I'll let you all know how it goes. Cheers!

It sounds like the minimum latency values do go fairly low if you're getting down to 1ms input.   But whether those values hold up under heavier CPU loads remains to be seen.   Hopefully I will know myself sometime soon since I should be receiving my shipment in the next few days.  
 

Yeah... I was a little worried about you, stevec. I know I may have steered you towards this but I realize now it is not a super low latency device. I did however achieve that 12ms roundtrip you said would be acceptable for you. I am running an i7 2600k with 16GB of RAM. I have to find a new BIOS inspector software or reinstall AISuite 2 to get a good look at what is happening with my CPU usage at these buffer settings. Really though everything looks good so far and I have put it through some semi rigorous experiments. From what I understand Guitar Rig is a pretty CPU intensive program and that is what I was cranking the guitar through (using the high samplerate setting) alongside unfrozen Session Drummer 3 tracks without any hiccups so that's probably a good sign. I really hope you can get it doing what you need because otherwise I would feel bad. Cheers.

Hi Beepster, just thought I'd update you on my progress...   
 
I've had the 18i6 running since Wednesday evening, and except for a glitch in the first hour of setup it's been running well.   Here's what happened - After getting the drivers and MixControl installed and updated, SONAR recognized everything just fine.  I then tried the Hi-Z input with bass and guitar to see how that faired... about 10 minutes in I suddenly lost the connection to the 18i6, both in SONAR and MixControl.   I tried unplugging and replugging the USB cable, rebooting a few times, etc, but none of that worked.  The only thing that did work was cycling the power to the unit.   But I've now had the 18i6 running constantly since them without any further hiccups.  Whew.
 
I did notice a bit of noise when turning the Input gain and/or Headphone volume way up, but since I would never have either of them quite that high in regular use I wasn't overly concerned.  At least not yet.  The Hi-Z input does sound pretty good to my ears, fairly thick and present.  Definitely better than my old Roland VM3100 and about the same as the Lexicon Ionix 422 (which was surprisingly good considering).  I haven't tried any of the other inputs yet, but I am eager to try a mic - Focusrite has a good reputation with preamps.
 
For latency, the lowest setting (1ms on the slider) gives me about 3ms input and 4.1ms output latency, for a total of 7.1ms roundtrip.   That's a good 5ms better than the Ionix' lowest settings.  I was able to load up Rapture, Novation Bass Station (love it) and Dimension Pro at that latency and just squeek by.  Once I added Zeta2 I had to increase latency to the next value, which gave me about 5ms input latency.  This was still very good for live playing and there wasn't a crackle or pop in sight.   Again, better driver performance than the Ionix.
 
I also loaded a fairly full project which previously forced me to use the Ionix' maximum latency setting (2048).   With the 18i6, about half way up the slider seemed work just fine.   And where the 50% CPU range would mean increasing latency with the Ionix, it's now about 70-75% with the 18i6.   And that extra 20% or so is very welcome in my book!
 
So far, so good...
 

That's great and thanks for letting me know. It's weird it gacked out like that on you though. Maybe something wasn't working at full capacity on the initial start up and need a power down/power up to get to normal operation. I unplug mine every time I'm done with it so I guess I avoided that issue if it's a regular occurrence. I haven't noticed any hiss or anything yet but I'll keep my ears on it. I generally have the headphones turned up pretty loud because I find that output to be sufficient but a little on the quiet side. Probably a safety feature to keep people from blowing out their eardrums. Anyway, have fun with it. I know I've been enjoying mine immensely. Cheers!

Anyway, have fun with it. I know I've been enjoying mine immensely. Cheers!

 
Ditto!  As long as it continues to work as it has over the last 48 hours, I'm good. 
 
Of course... I also purchased a BCF2000 so my time right now is split between the two.  Fun stuff. 

Well that looks like a useful little dealymadoodle. Eventually I'll have to look into control surfaces like that. Any extra cash has to go towards other stuff for now though. Like GR5 (maybe) and an Axiom 25... I should probably buy some groceries too (so hungy). ;-p

Plugged in one of my low end condensers tonight. The sound was ridiculously clear. In fact it brought the mic out so much I noticed the true characteristics of it. I need a new mic. lol

Beep, I've been following your post since it's inception, I've been using a Line 6 UX-1 for about 4 years now and it works..........But there is the "What am I missing out on" factor that wants me to get a new interface. After your weeks of extensive and vigorous field testing................Do you recommend the scarlett 18i6? The price point is another decision maker. It's a toss up between the Quad capture and the 18i6. (but the 18i6 has more input options.)  I'm flip floppin like a flounder on the beach and I cant decide. 

Hi, keneds. The short answer would be yes. I think it's a great little box so far and I am quite happy I chose it.

The long answer (there always seems to be a looong answer with me doesn't there? lol) is, probably. I have only really been doing some very basic stuff with it so far. Who knows, the thing might die or catch fire or call me nasty names when I'm not around after a while but I haven't seen any reports of malfunctions online so that's probably unlikely. The other thing is the Quad Capture is supposed to be the superior device of the two in regards to latency and signal quality but not having a QC to compare it to I can't say for certain. I just took a quick look at the QC on the Roland site and it does not seem to have an optical/ADAT connector for expanding the inputs which I thought Seth had told me it did but he must have meant another unit. In fact it doesn't seem to have much of anything. There have also been reports of some of the Roland i/o drivers being a little wonky but that might be for older devices and I'm sure once they release the next round of drivers those issues will be solved. But IMO unless you REALLY need the ultra low latency I don't think that unit is a very thrifty decision at $270 (the 18i6 is $300). Maybe take a look at the other Roland stuff that does have the expansion options. I say this because if you are worried about inputs expansion is one way around it. Just use the unit as is for light everyday tracking and if you need to record a full band at some point you could probably rent a mic pre box. The Scarlett however DOES have one of these connectors which is cool. Also if your old interface has an optical OUT (it has to be out) you can supposedly use that as an expansion unit with the Scarlett. I'm not sure how well this works but there are a couple other people on here who've said they've done it with the Scarlett and Matt from Focusrite told me that it was indeed that simple. I'm gonna try it with my Layla 3g at some point to bring up my multi in/mic pre count to 4. Speaking of which one other thing to know about the 18i6 is if you intend to use more than the two multi ins on the Scarlett be aware that the other inputs are line ins only so you'll need a mixer, DI boxes or amps with line outs on them (I'm pretty sure that's how that works) and without an expansion box or using SPDIF connectors you only get 8 inputs. But that's enough to record a full drum kit or do bed tracks with a full band which is what pushed me over the top to buy it.

Anyway, if you read the thread and have been looking at other reviews and articles online about the 18i6 you probably know most of that stuff already but I figured I'd condense it down in one post. Basically if you can tolerate only getting about 12ms round trip latency (7ms for very low intensity tasks from stevec's description) I'd say it's a winner and the price can't be beat for what you get. The high Z sounds great. The mic pres sound great. The MixControl software is super easy to use and allows you do do all sorts of neat stuff. You get a bunch of plug ins as well as Ableton Live Lite and Novation BassStation and the customer support is awesome. The only complaints I have ever seen about this unit were in regards to their old drivers and that issue has been corrected as of the last couple driver/firmware updates which can be found on the Focusrite website.

Hope that helps. Cheers!

Hiya Beep and keneds... regarding the Quad Capture... I'm using one of those, as I have probably said before (so sorry for repeating that). Regarding the so called "ultra low latency," I'm not too sure about that to be honest, although I'm still getting my head around the settings. Some of this stuff is new to me. My old desktop had an internal RME sound card and I don't remember how I went about setting that up.

Anyway, my driver settings are currently:-

Audio Buffer Size = 4 (not sure what that means and it can be varied between 1 to 9)

ASIO Setting = 96 samples (44100 Hz)

and my X1 audio page is showing a total roundtrip of 11.9 milliseconds

I'm not even sure if that is good, but when I tried to lower the Audio Buffer Size last week, my laptop crashed, so I have left it set to 4.

So, as I said, I'm not sure that the Quad Capture a bit better than Beeps 18i6, as far as latency is concerned.

So, that leaves inputs, and it is here, as has been mentioned, that the 18i6 scores. If inputs are an issue, then the 18i6 is the way to go.

The Quad Capture does have coax SPDIF input and output, and you could add, if you wish, another two line/mic inputs, giving you a total of four. That would allow drums to be recorded with a simple pair of overheads, plus a bass drum mic and a mic on the snare. I have an old Roland MMP-2 mic preamp that has coax SPDIF connectivity, but I have not got around to connecting it to my QC to see if it gives me those two extra mic/line inputs.

Okay, perhaps not much help there, and I still need to do some proper work with my QC (I'm still getting to grips with my new laptop/DAW setup at the moment).

Hi, synkrotron. Thanks for the input. It sounds to me like you are actually getting quite good latency from the QC. The limitation sounds to be the laptop. That 1-9 setting is likely similar to the settings on my Scarlett (1-10 milliseconds and no I don't really know how that works into the final equation but that's how the 18i6 and MixControl software deals with buffer settings). So at a setting of what I am assuming is 4ms you are getting better roundtrip latency than I am with my setting at 2. If you had it on a more powerful desktop that could handle the extra CPU load at the 2ms setting it is likely you'd be getting something around 5-6ms roundtrip and at the 1ms setting you could be getting the 2-3 ms roundtrip latency that device seems to be capable of from hearing the Cakewalk/Roland dudes talk about it. I think it really depends on the system at that point. I could however be completely wrong (I usually am about the really fancy tech stuff... lol) but if you know someone with a super high powered desktop it might be interesting to check out. I myself am curious what kind of results you'll get from the QC in general (mic pres, high Z, line in signals, general mayhem, etc) so let us know how it's working out. Cheers!

Keneds - I have a Line 6 KB37 and a Scarlett 18i6. I use them both extensively. I prefer the KB37 for all my electric guitar tracks and working with Guitar Rig 5 and Pod Farm. The guitars while inputting dry onto the track via the KB37 have full on effects applied and sound like I'm playing straight out of an amp. Really natural sound and feeling. And of course it's handy to have the keyboard there when I feel like using that device for an input. That all said, I use the Scarlett for everything else because it works flawlessly, sounds crystal clear, and I can throw tons of inputs at it including through the ADAT input which works fantastic. The mic pres are great and the mix Control software works well with very little to learn to make it go. Sonar X1 is very convenient for me to switch between the two audio interfaces as needed.

Sorry for not coming back sooner. I was having a bit of a nightmare last night, experimenting with different buffer size settings, and adding more soft synth tracks to my current test project. I had got up to thirteen synth tracks, plus one audio track (just some guitar noodling). I then added an instance of Rapture and I also decided to play with the Step Sequencer (didn't have that in 6). My lappy crashed five times, and at one point I experienced the dreaded BSOD. I even tried increasing the buffer size, quite considerably, just in case I was pushing the system too hard. But it still crashed, and I eventually deleted the Rapture instance.

Funny thing is, the CPU meter didn't show any real strain on the system at all. One of the eight cores was operating at around 45% and the others were being tickled at around 10 ~ 15%. The memory commit was showing as 3gb and the disk performance was a lowly 0.1%, as I expected, as there is only one audio track.

I am going to create another test project, but with only one instance of Rapture, and see what happens.

Anyway, back onto the Q-C. I have put together quite a detailed description of my laptop, including all of the different audio device buffer sizes and associated latencies. Probably too much info actually... An interesting thing to note is that in my last post I said that I was getting a roundtrip of 11.9 milliseconds. When I was making a note of all the buffer settings and their latencies, that 11.9 milliseconds had reduced to 9.8 milliseconds, a difference of 2 milliseconds. The only thing that I can think of is that I realised yesterday that there was an updated driver available for the Q-C, so I duly updated it.

Regarding the other areas of interest, that is, mic pre's, hi-z, line input signals and stuff... I've yet to get onto that, but will do in the next couple of days. I'll be frank... I'm more of a synth person, and I don't do much real instrument recording for my own material. I do intend to address that, however, and I'll be incorporating more guitar into my compositions. I only hope that my fifty two year old ears can still tell if what I am listening to is any good :)

Here is all the gumf:-

Laptop Specification:-
CLEVO Model = P150EM
Chassis & Display = 15.6" Matte 95% Gamut LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) = Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3820QM (2.70GHz) 8MB cache
Memory (RAM) = 16GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card = NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 675M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
1st Hard Disk = 120GB Intel® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk = 240GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
Internal Sound Card = Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack (REALTEK)
Network Facilities = GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® N130 802.11N (150Mbps) + BLUETOOTH
USB Options = 3 x USB 3.0 PORTS + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT AS STANDARD
Firewire = 1 X 1394a FIREWIRE PORT

Some more chipset info:-
ACPI x64 based PC
3rd Gen Intel® Core™ CPUs
Intel® HM77 Express Chipset
Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1200 v2

External Sound Card = Roland QUAD-CAPTURE UA-55

Device Settings and Latency:-

Buffer Size = 1 (0.7ms, 32 samples)
Input = 1.8ms, 80 samples
Output = 3.3ms, 145 samples
Roundtrip = 5.1ms, 225 samples

Buffer Size = 2 (1.1ms, 48 samples)
Input = 2.2ms, 96 samples
Output = 4.3ms, 191 samples
Roundtrip = 6.5ms, 287 samples

Buffer Size = 3 (1.5ms, 64 samples)
Input = 2.5ms, 112 samples
Output = 5.1ms, 224 samples
Roundtrip = 7.6ms, 336 samples

Buffer Size = 4 (2.2ms, 96 samples)
Input = 3.3ms, 144 samples
Output = 6.6ms, 290 samples
Roundtrip = 9.8ms, 434 samples

Buffer Size = 5 (2.9ms, 128 samples)
Input = 4.0ms, 176 samples
Output = 8.1ms, 356 samples
Roundtrip = 12.1ms, 532 samples

Buffer Size = 6 (5.8ms, 256 samples)
Input = 6.9ms, 304 samples
Output = 13.8ms, 610 samples
Roundtrip = 20.7ms, 914 samples

Buffer Size = 7 (11.6ms, 512 samples)
Input = 12.7ms, 560 samples
Output = 25.3ms, 1117 samples
Roundtrip = 38.0ms, 1677 samples

Buffer Size = 8 (23.2ms, 1024 samples)
Input = 24.3ms, 1072 samples
Output = 48.6ms, 2142 samples
Roundtrip = 72.9ms, 3214 samples

Buffer Size = 9 (46.4ms, 2048 samples)
Input = 47.5ms, 2096 samples
Output = 95.1ms, 4193 samples
Roundtrip = 142.6ms, 6289 samples



edit - on reading this through I realise that I should really take the whole of this into its own topic, assuming anyone thinks it is worthwhile... it just appears to totally take over Beeps original topic, apologies for that. I will edit this out if requested.

Hiya, synkrotron. Although I think you probably should start a new thread (possibly in the computers tab but I guess the X1 tab works too seeing as how your issues seem to start with Rapture) to get some ideas as to how to troubleshoot your issues I appreciate you dropping that here. I truly was curious as to the latency values of the QC. Looks to me like it is only slightly faster than the 18i6. Weird. I thought it would get much better results. To me your computer specs look great so I have no idea what could be causing the crashes (but I'm not an expert so hopefully one of the smarter folks here can help). You say Rapture seems to be causing this? I think that is the program that a lot of people were having problems with after they installed the Filmscore pack. Do you have that installed? If so there were a few threads on the topic a couple weeks back you might want to look into. Anyway if it keeps up and you can't get an answer here on the forum you might want to consider getting a hold of Cakewalk support because that is absolutely not right. Have you done an audio optimization for your system? Thanks for taking the time to type all that up. Cheers!

yeah, I think you're right Beep, that I should start a new thread, or even two. I need to do some more tests in a project with just one instance of Rapture, for starters, and if I continue to have issues than I will raise a thread, in the appropriate sub forum. I don't have the Filmscore pack, but I did pay £14.99 to upgrade from LE to a full license, so I would like to see it working properly.

I will probably post some of the above as a new thread in the hardware forum, so that prospective buyers of the QUAD-CAPTURE can pour over the number. And I still need to "review" its audio recording capabilities.

Regarding Audio Optimization... yeah... I did do that, but I am wondering if I should do it again, considering my recent problem, and the fact that I updated the QUAD-CAPTURE driver.

@beepster, not sure if you guys are still on this forum yet, but i just got an 18i6 and hooked it up to my mac (osx running logic 9.1), and am getting a very low input level when connecting my roland vdrum kit via any input (line 3-8 in the back, or line/mic 1/2 in the front). if i crank the volume over 50% i am able to hear the audio, but the input level is extremely low. i looked at mixcontrol and everything appears to be correct, and the level out of the roland kit is at full volume. also i'm getting a hum on inputs 7&8 in the back, no clue why that would happen. any ideas?