slight grittiness

Haven't had this before with SONAR. There is some slight distortion in the mix. Been soloing and muting looking for the cause. No luck yet. Repros playing the stereo mix on another system. Levels all very modest, no red lights.
 
CAF

Hay ChewingAluminumFoi
Try this, It may not be, But might be a variable I seek an answer for also...Noise on the audio...but it seems intermittent, and not always happening.
 
Go into Preferences, and unselect the asio, choose whatever else is there, as a selectable alternative, click apply once selected, say yes to the window that pops up....and then reselect the asio for your device, and hit apply again, and say yes to the pop up,... if using that ASIO,or wmd, or X direct x drivers...if so...(ASIO for all not so good to use).
If not that, do it for whatever else you are using for your ins and outs...Just changing this can resort to a forced refresh, and release of the OS applications, which may bind things to your device by mistake, when using windows MS OS for other tasks such as internet viewing or Media playing of video or audio....I believe is happening with MS OS becoming muddled up with all the selections being installed by third party applications not coded to use, correctly, other than the MS defaults as base Drivers.
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Once refreshed, and you make sure the buffers are set to a reasonable level for your mix, try the play back again and see what happens....Make sure your outputs are correctly set on the master bus output for your device.
 
And if that does not work....well, out come the hats, and more input from you to trouble shoot the possible cause, and route that nasty out of the machine.
 
I3 cpu...hmmm...? might be a hindering weakness depending on what is being done in the project with XYZ also.?

Hi CAF,
It may be a bit of a long shot, but I've noticed that on my system occasionally Slate's VBC plugins will produce some distortion on their release when using the VST3 version. Took me forever to figure out because it would only do it when the compressor was being pushed past 2 or 3 db of gain reduction, so when I solo'd particular tracks it wasn't there because individual tracks weren't putting enough level into the compressor. Maybe try globally bypassing fx in the project and see if that fixes it. If so, bypass one by one until you find the offending effect.
 
Good luck
Dean

Here's a snippet.  Yes, it's a kids song I'm working on for mothers' day.  I doubt my wife will care about the grit but it's bugging me that I can't figure it out.  It's a simple mix, EZ-Drummer, bass, acoustic guitar, synth pad, vocals, single reverb on a bus set at 100% wet.
 
snippet
 

Maybe I'm getting ear-blind from hearing it too much.  But I was hoping with such a simple mix to hear everything nice and clear.  Maybe the V-Vocal artifacting is messing me up.  Does anyone else hear any distortion?  Maybe I'm just being paranoid now.
 
CAF

Way wild guess.
 
I have heard what you describe when my optical cable is acting up slightly error-ing on some data words.
Try upping your buffers to lighten the load and or defrag the data drive. Also maybe bounce to clips tracks that may
have a lot of splits and edits. <-- this has caused me some angst.
 

Check you plugin gains and outputs!