The absolute lowest latency isn't a huge deal as long as it has hardware monitoring.  My Fast Track has a total reported latency of around 340 samples in the preferences screen in Sonar (256 buffer + apparently 84 samples of hardware latency?).  

I guess the price might be marginally higher for me because I don't have firewire on my motherboard.  What firewire chipset should I be looking at in a PCI or PCI-express card?


edit: apologies to Steven Mikel, he did suggest the Saffire6.  Whoops.

That's what I was thinking, but wanted to be sure.  Thanks Beagle!

Wellllll eff.  I know why it was an open box.  No amount of driver fiddling would get it to actually do anything.  My firewire card is good because a USB/Firewire enclosure I own works fine with it.  I did the bit with the legacy firewire driver, and tried beta drivers from the Focusrite page.  Regardless, it would show up in Device Manager and that's it; the Focusrite ASIO app said there wasn't a device installed even though it was powered up.  Plugged it into my old G4 Mac and it worked fine.  So it's got to be some sort of driver/hardware issue with Win7 x64.  :-(     

dlogan


FWIW - When I first got an M-Audio Fast Track Ultra, it was "plug in and play" on Windows XP 32-bit with no problems at all. However, when I switched to a new computer with W7 64-bit - dropouts like crazy. I didn't get much help on the M-Audio forum and after a very frustrating several days of trial and error (and being "this close" to finding another interface), what finallly worked for me was turning off "high performance mode" on the FTU and disabling my wireless card. No problems at all after that, but getting there was sort of painful.

Thanks for posting this. I am considering a FTU. I m in the process of setting up this week (house full of kids and grandkids this week... about to pull hair out already... I think actually trying to use X1 would push me right over the edge this week... after the Super Bowl... everyone gone... happy day!!!!) anyway, I have a ZOOM R-16 I am going to try to use for an interface/controller. I've gotten the 64bit drivers and ASIO for it... I was thinking after reading your post that if I have a problem with it your ideas may help with it too. In the past i've had to go into "services" and disable almost everything while running S7PE... I hope to not have to do that much running an i5 with 8G of RAM... the most I had beforewas 1G, single processor that was actually faster GHZ but single core, Pentium 4.
 
Anyway, thanks for posting because i'll probably end up with an FTU... it looks good.
 
Julien

jbow

StevenMikel


For under $250 I'd say the best is Focusrite Saffire6 or Line 6 UX2.I just got a Line 6 UX2 and like it alot but,if you can swing $350,the Fast Track Ultra is the way to go.It has very low latency,plenty of ins and outs,dsp and,you're already familiar with M-Audio.You might also check out the Fast Track Pro if you haven't already.

Does the UX-2 run ok with X1, 64bit, and ASIO? I've updted my UX-2drivers and see that they have ASIO but I was not sure how well it would work with x1/64bit. I am running an i5 processor with a 7200 RPM internal HD and USB-2. I have an e SATA port too and may get a faster HD... I think all this is going to work well once I have the space and peace of mind to try it... though I am a little worried because it seems like every post on every Cakewalk forum is about some problem or other... I wonder if anyoneis using X1 without problems.
 
J

  I wouldn't know about 64bit,I'm using Windows XP 32 bit and I'm using Guitar Tracks Pro 4.
You have a better pc than mine so,you shouldn't have many problems if any at all.Go to the Line 6 forums and look around and check out the UX2 product page.