Building latency issue. Please help.

 Hey, I have scoured this forum and read other latency related posts but I am still having issues and hope someone could give me a hand. I am just doing some tracking with acoustic and electric guitars (mic), bass guitar (DI), and have a midi drum track. Everything has been going well, up to now. I am trying to record a vocal track and monitor it via input echo with some added reverb however I am getting some latency making it impossible to do. Which has become very frustrating.

Each guitar track has approx 10 different layers/takes, most of them are muted and I would like to keep the different takes around till I get everything down at which point I can start to pick and choose.

No FX have been added, other than the reverb on the vocal track but even without the reverb I am still getting latency.

Here is my chain:
Rode NT1-A ->
FMR Audio RNP (side chain FMR Audio RNC )->
Mackie 1402-VLZ3 Mixer channel 1 via Alt 3-4 ->
M-AUDIO Audiophile 2496
My PC: AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
5GB (2 x 2GB, 1x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal HDD
Windows 7 x64
Sonar Producer X1 64 Using ASIO drivers
Everything is Output to the Master and Master is set Out to my Maudio analog out to 7-8 on my mackie mixer.
I have set Sonar priority to High in the Task Mgr.
I created a new project and recorded a test vocal track and didn't hear any noticeable latency so this seems to be an issues with that show up/gets worse as tracks/layers are added.

so, obviously I'd like to get rid of the latency. I'd hope to get some insight on what's happening and determine if it is possible to do what I am attempting on a home studio budget?
Does anything jump out as to why I am getting this latency?
I am under the impression that my audio interface(audiophile 2496) might be my weak spot.
Would upgrading this fix the latency issues? How far of an upgrade would I need to go.
In the meantime are there any changes I can make to my recording technique under my current setup that would help?

Any insight is appreciated. thanks!

What's your ASIO buffer size and Round Trip Latency reported by SONAR? Input monitoring vocals is probably the most latency-sensitive thing you can do, because you're not used to hearing your own voice with any latency at all.

If your RTL is over 6ms, it's likely going to bother you. You'll need to run your buffer at 64 samples to get into that range at 44.1kHz. Then it's just a matter of whether the 2496 drivers and tuning of your system will allow you to do that reliably without dropping buffers.

And you'll need to stay away from reverbs (e.g. convolution types like Perfect space) or any other FX that use additional buffers to do their processing.

According to information from Noel, the Cakewalk Chief Technical Officer, setting windows for background services priorty is old stuff and not applicable to SONAR, so it's recommended to keep that setting on Programs priority.

Brundlefly is on the ball here.

OP:

Try setting your ASIO hardware buffer latency setting to the lowest you can run without bad delay and without bad pops and clicks. Do you still get latency when that latency setting is at the lowest?
 
If I understand you correctly, you have all tracks in SONAR set to Master, your Master output set to the main M-Audio output, your main M-Audio output is going into your Mackie Mixer, and you have headphones connected to the Mackie Mixer to monitor. If you don't have it setup this way do that, and make sure your ASIO latency setting is set at the lowest. Your system is good enough to handle a 64 sample latency setting. Start off by using the lowest setting you have.

Does that setup work without noticeble latency using input monitoring? If so, you're all good. If not, go get the DPC Latency Checker and see if your readings are good (always in the green)? If they are, it's probably your audio interface, as you suspect. How low are your readings in the graph of the DPC Latency Checker?

If your readings are in the yellow or red areas of the graph, troubleshoot according to the recommendations of the DPC Latency Checker.

Alternatively, try all the above in WDM driver mode.

Actually, M-Audio is pretty good with writing drivers. I think you should be seeing readings 100usec and below with your system specs.


If you don't do any playback or recording with SONAR open and the input echo button enabled, do you hear any latency when you speak/sing into the mic? If you hear yourself without any latency when SONAR is not recording audio, it may be that there is a slowness with writing to the hard drive.

From your signature, I see you have a WD 7200rpm hard drive. Is that the only hard drive you have? If so that's probably your problem, You could get better performance with at least one addtional separate hard drive (at least 7200rpm speed) for your projects.

There may be some BIOS tweaks you can make to get your system latency lower.

You can try disabling in the BIOS power saving features and one or two more features such as HPET, CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E), and C3/C6/C7 if you have listings for any of those in your BIOS. Disabling these have helped with getting lower DPC Latency and better overall low-latency performance using SONAR.

$500 will get you a good audio interface capable of stable low latency performance. If you go that route I would recommend the Roland Octa-Captute/Quad-Capture or the MOTU UltraLite-MK3 Hybird. That MOTU unit works great when using the firewire connectivity (it also has USB 2 connectivity, but I read it's not as well as the firewire connectivity. I have the MK3 that's not the Hybird and it has firewire only connectivity and I'm very pleased with it's low latency performance.)

However, the firewire route means you need to have or get a firewire port that has a Texas Instrument (TI) chipset for compatibility reasons or you could run into latency problems or drop outs, pops, and clicks, types of problems using a firewire unit. So, to be on the side of best reports, the Octa-Capture sounds like a winner.

Hope's this helps.

I actually have 2 drives, One WD 7200 for the OS and program files where Sonar is installed and the WD 7200 Black for my projects and audio files. It's my understanding this is the best setup. Feel free to correct me if i am wrong.

Thanks for the hints on the BIOS settings I dug around and found HPET enabled so i disabled it. C1E and virtualization was already disabled from a previous tweak

Regarding the firewire interface. Would getting a PCI Firewire card w/ the TI chipset work or do i need to look at firewire integrated into a motherboard?


"wow!!.. man i hope you get what you are after.. to me its very extreme. and in reality a mixing nightmare. "

It's really just different takes of the same riff or variation thereof but i want to wait to have everything down before i select the take I want then delete the other layers. This cant be that unconventional...

I'm not 100% certain that setting priority to high in Task Manager is a good idea.

Goto Windows performance settings (right click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings) -> Advanced.... Cakewalk recommend this is set to "Programs" (NB this is what CAKEWALK recommends).

And disable core parking (or speedstep). Plenty of info in these forums about that.

Finally try using the legacy 64 bit driver for firewire.

NB my focusrite has ZERO latency when it comes to recording (i.e. musicians don't get any latency in their headphones providing you set up the mix correctly in Sonar and the Focusrite software (Mix Control). Playback is a different matter. Not sure if you can do anything similar.

Cheers....

You can try disabling in the BIOS power saving features and one or two more features such as HPET, CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E), and C3/C6/C7 if you have listings for any of those in your BIOS. Disabling these have helped with getting lower DPC Latency and better overall low-latency performance using SONAR. 



Thanks guys, been having DPC latency figures at idle up to 300 microsecs. Now its down to 6 with just those tweaks!! Thanks again

 

I have a MOTU 828 MKII that I just retired. It really worked great but I went with two Octa-Captures strapped together for more inputs. I could not mix an Octa-Capture with the MOTU and use ASIO drivers so that is why I made the change. It was not at all prompted by any functional deficiencies I had at the time with the MOTU. You can do 96 Khz/24 bit recording without issues with this unit. I used mine for recording keyboards and never had any issues. I have used the SMPTE features on this unit and it worked well for that also which is something I do NOT have on my Octa-Captures.

Good to hear. Searching around on google for the MKII with Windows doesn't paint a pretty picture.

been having DPC latency figures at idle up to 300 microsecs. Now its down to 6 with just those tweaks!! Thanks again

 
Man, that's really good for you! The only one I know who had readings as low is Brandon Ryan. My readings average around 23usecs. You must be elated! 
 
Anyway, glad to be of some help. :)

You mentioned that you got latency with or without reverb. Does this mean you turned it off off removed it.  I've noticed latency causing items - especially verbs, need to be removed from the path to remove the time compensation factor.

Cheers..Grif