Background noises sound details lost when only recording, and still lost in the playback

DUE TO OUR PRO AUDIO PRODUCTS BEING DISCONTINUED, WE DO NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORT WINDOWS 10, AND HAVE NO PLANS TO UPDATE OUR DRIVERS. IF YOU ARE USING WINDOWS 10, USE THE LATEST DRIVER VERSION LISTED FOR YOUR HARDWARE, BUT RESULTS MAY VARY.

parco

Cactus Music
 goggled your interface. 
 
Firewire-based interface, a very positive review back in the October 2005 
 
This from the Echo web site: 
 

DUE TO OUR PRO AUDIO PRODUCTS BEING DISCONTINUED, WE DO NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORT WINDOWS 10, AND HAVE NO PLANS TO UPDATE OUR DRIVERS. IF YOU ARE USING WINDOWS 10, USE THE LATEST DRIVER VERSION LISTED FOR YOUR HARDWARE, BUT RESULTS MAY VARY.

 
 Sorry my friend but in this game you stay up to date or you can expect issues with you system. And Firewire cards themselves,, you might be hearing "machine" noises. Sonar, and all DAW's record what the audio interface feeds them exactly verbatim. Don't blame the software. 

 

Yes you're right, "Sonar, and all DAW's record what the audio interface feeds them exactly verbatim.", from my hearing, correct, but only when realtime input monitoring in SONAR. I hope you won't think that PCM samples coming into SONAR system then output from SONAR immediately have nothing to do with the audio driver, DAW software, OS and 1394 devices.... or you can absolutely scare me until s**t bricks if you're going to tell me that Cakewalk SONAR is definitely a hardware like Roland mixer and absolutely not a software which can be run inside an x86-64 OS system......... I always trust your wise man and I absolutely believe that your brain have no any problems or damages....... ;) I know you're awesome.
 
First you can never listen to this sound difference clearly with your speakers, or you may hear it but you never notice that from your speakers. You can only really notice this difference easily from your closed-back headphones. Find a public area, like lobby or somewhere, public area (indoor) of a university, or your living room with some sounds turned-on TV, or your noisy air conditioner, or some bg noises else. Use your mic and mic pre-amp with certain quality. Make sure you have given enough mic gain. Then put on your closed-back (the soundproofing one) headphone. Then you can really hear the difference.
 
For my case in these situations:
 
1. Only hardware digital zero-latency realtime monitoring inside my Audiofire (nothing to do with SONAR): bg noises were very easy to be heard and full of details, sounded like while I put off my headphone. Brilliant and smooth, like analogue monitoring.
2. Only software realtime monitoring inside Cakewalk SONAR with 17ms total delay (in delay + out delay + extra) from my ASIO driver: Still brilliant and smooth, like the first situation (same sounds as hardware monitoring). No details lost, bg noises were still complete and very easy to be heard.
3. Only kept my SONAR software monitoring turned on and then pressed record button, started recording: Most of the bg sounds gone suddenly, had been quiet a lot. Couldn't easily listen to the bg noises anymore, sounded like isolated from the environment.
4. Stopped all hardware and software monitoring, listened to the recorded track playback only: same sounds as the 3rd situation above. Sounded like something soundproofing and had been absorbed a lot. Sounded like a forced built-in gateway filter applied, which automatically muted all sound quieter than a low level decibel. Ruined all recordings which request a very fine fidelity....
 
Believe me, I didn't want to believe that is caused by SONAR, so I decided to test both realtime delayed software sounds from SONAR and the SONAR recordings. I can't believe that's the evident difference inside the SONAR system!
 
I'm not as wealthy as you think. I've disabled my onboard sound in BIOS, and the Audiofire is my only sound device, my only interface, my only AD/DA, I do not own others, just own this Audiofire. And All the SONAR software realtime 17ms monitoring and recording come from the same channels of the same Audiofire, with exactly the same ASIO buffer size, same sampling rate, no others. I can read there are so many Audiofire owners in SoundOnSound and Gearslutz said their Windows 8/8.1 driver works incredibly awesome in Windows 10 without any problems, great sounds, which exactly same as my case. :) This is still a great interface. huh.........