Focusrite owners - how are the W7 drivers?

BTW, this is the Scarlett 8i6 USB 2.0

I'm using the Scarlett 8i6 with XP sp3.
The drivers are okish.
Mostly rock solid but sometimes everything gets confused and Sonar crashes.
This is especially true when recording - playback is usually fine. It is nice and quiet and sounds transparent

If the truth be told I should not have bought it.
Why:

1. Latest drivers are sometimes sluggish to respond when arming a track.
2. The control software is so, so complicated, it is really hard to fathom out routing etc.
3. I have to use a pre-amp and then use balanced leads into input 3. Inputs 1 and 2 do NOT have enough gain on them for normal phantom powered mic XLR connection - you have to turn them right up - I don't like that at all.
4. Drivers do crash Sonar from time to time - really embarassing in front of other folks! Replay starts stuttering, then get big clicks and then a freeze or blue screen.
   1. Unit absolutely hates other USB connections so only use a PS2 mouse. USB mouse on another USB header also causes issues.
5. Using 48Hz at 6ms latency is usually ok. Don't try lower latency.

bmdaustin


Hello, I'm looking at the Focusrite 8i6 interface, but I'm not sure about driver quality. I'm running W7 Home 64 on a new Dell Inspiron 620, 6GB RAM. What says the crowd?

I know it's not the device you're asking about, but I have the Focusrite VMBox on a fairly new machine purchased from Studiocat.  The VMBox fails to do the handshake upon boot-up of the computer about 50% of the time.  If I uplug the USB connection and plug back in, that normally fixes it ... so I've got a work-around even though it's a minor PITA.  While it's possible it's the fault of some other component, I'm pretty inclinded to think it's a problem with the VMBox drivers.

Using the Scarlett 8i6 USB with Win 7 64 bit and Sonar X1. Works just fine.

I have Saffire Pro 14.

Never had any trouble with the stock Win Firewire driver (not legacy) and  Saffire MixControl 2.2 
FW-Driver 3.5.3.8786


These are not the latest drivers, but they work perfectly for me - never had any trouble ever on any DAW (Live, Sonar, Reaper)

I've got the 8i6, was in the same position as yourself about 8 months back. Personally, I wish I had opted for the Octacapture. As much as the 8i6 is a nice little device, it can be quite picky with usb ports, has some issues with certain hubs I have tried, both mains powered and bus-powered. The drivers also failed to connect or hung using sonar/ableton (thankfully this was  later sorted, less of an issue, but does still happen on the off) I find the inputs a little low compared to other units I have tried and although you can get a decent signal out of it, it sometimes requires cranking it nearly full...which is something I'm not fond off. The MixControl can take a bit of figuring out, if you are time limited, then this may be a pain in the butt as you would probably want to set up your own templates and the one's that are as standard aren't suitable for everyone's way of working. Also the headphone's are tied to outs' 3/4, you can reroute in a way (manual jobby).
Latency, not bad, can get decent values without crackling and popping, some issues with one or two plugs which required changing the buffer. Normally record at 5ms and can do so at 2ms on most occasions. Please don't take this as an out n out review, my time has been spent mostly dealing with driver issues, of which most are now settled. I think most of the issues I have are with the time wasted attempting to get the device working as it seems to be now. The mixcontrol woe's are something that i'm still figuring out, but it's workable as i'm not likely to be upgrading any time soon.
Even so, I would still have preferred the octa.

biglongy - I won't be using a USB hub, but the port issue might bite me - might have to get creative there. How did you solve your failed driver connection issues? Also, are outs 3&4 always tied to the headphones or can that be changed in the Mixer app?

I haven't checked how low I can get by but I'm running it at 96kHz with 8ms right now and it is rock solid.

 
Just to be curious, what's a "comfortable" CPU range to be running at 8ms? 
 

Just to be curious, what's a "comfortable" CPU range to be running at 8ms?

 
Just ran a quick test. I get 8.1ms when using an Octa-Capture setup of 3 (128 samples) and I can get down to 7.2ms when I use the max setup of 1 (96 samples). The latency is spread (input 4.1ms, output 3.1ms - buffer is 1.0ms). So far I didn't detect any difference in quality nor any dropouts. I will keep it that way I guess.
 
Not sure how to answer the CPU question with the way Sonar report CPU on multiple cores. The pattern I see is usally one core loaded at around 50% and the rest spread on the other cores but at no more than 10-15% each. Like I'm using NI (Kontakt, GR5, Battery,etc) for anything else but guitars and vocals I guess that the CPU usage is mostly NI.

Not sure how to answer the CPU question with the way Sonar report CPU on multiple cores. The pattern I see is usally one core loaded at around 50% and the rest spread on the other cores but at no more than 10-15% each

 
Thanks!  That's exactly what I was looking for. 
 
I'm currently using a borrowed Lexicon IO U42s USB interface, and while latency can get fairly low - about the same as the OctaCapture - it starts to suffer when the first core gets up in the 50% range.  So as soon as a project starts to grow I have to increase latency because the drivers just don't handle higher CPU loads that well.   That's something I definitely want to avoid going forward.