Sonar 4 Producer and UAD-1 Latency...

Has anyone else experienced latency issues with UAD-1 PPI's in Sonar 4? Especially when sending tracks with UAD-1 plugins to a sub bus with UAD-1 plugins? In my experience, it happens all of the time but is considerably worse when using busses. I have gone to great expense trying to eliminate the latency problems as well as the unusual audio artifacts that were related to the UAD-1. I have even completely rebuilt my DAW with like components. New Mobo, CPU's, RAM and UAD-1s. I only spent that money because we are building a second studio and I have read great reviews on this DAW configuration in other forums. If I had to I could piece out the components on ebay and get most of my money back. I am running an Asus NCCH-DL dual 3.0 Xeon Nocona Mobo w/ 2GB DDR 400 2-2-2-5 RAM, WD 74GB Raptor SATA hard drives and 4 UAD-1's in a Magma chassis. My audio interfaces are the MOTU 2408 Mk3 core and a MOTU 24i/o expansion. I have my XP Pro OS running bare minimum services and I have tweaked the PCI latency reducing the priority of the video card and increasing the MOTU and UAD-1's to top priority. I have tried different PCI slot configurations and I have verified that the audio cards are not sharing IRQ's. I have updated all drivers and firmware to the latest versions. I have disabled all unnecessary on board devices. I did have to re-enable the onboard NIC because the Magma cards would not work otherwise for some freaky reason. I have disabled hyperthreading in the bios. I have flashed the bios to the latest rev. I have tried every possible configuration of buffer settings in my ASIO panel as well as the Sonar Audio/Advanced settings. The best UAD-1 latency results is with MOTU buffers set at 512 and Sonar buffers set at 128. The best Sonar CPU and Disk meter results is with MOTU buffers at 1024 and Sonar buffers at 160. UA tech's suggested a Magma PCI expansion chassis so I bought one. It definitely resolved all of the issues that I was having except for the latency issue. I absolutely can not use the UAD-1 PPI's on any drum tracks because the latency is way too obvious on percussion tracks. I've read other posts in other forums of people with my same setup that say their systems are rock solid. Cakewalk techs and UA techs both say that Sonar has built in latency compensation and that this problem should not be happening. I love the quality and authenticity of these UAD-1 PPI's. Surely there is a way to make this work. I really don't want to give them up. Any suggestions other than burning all of my gear? Thanks...

Thanks for your reply. I thought about getting the S5 upgrade but I have read some posts that indicate that it is a lot more CPU intensive. Is that your experience as well?

Yes, I am experiencing this problem while trying to mix existing tracks. We do most of our tracking at the Sound Emporium in Nashville and then do the mix downs and mastering at our studios in the Phoenix area. When we track, we monitor through analog with zero latency.

Has anyone else experienced latency issues with UAD-1 PPI's in Sonar 4? Especially when sending tracks with UAD-1 plugins to a sub bus with UAD-1 plugins? In my experience, it happens all of the time but is considerably worse when using busses.

Do you have any other brand of plugins in this chain ? ...some plugs do not play well inserted between UAD1 plugins.

I experienced that with SONAR4.02/UAD 3.08, especially noticable on drum tracks.

However, that particular combination was so problematic that latency was the least of my concerns (the export click/pop situation was killing me...)

S4.03/Uad 3.09 did not exhibit this, nor has the 4.04 patch ( very stable thus far).

Haven't applied the UAD 4.0 yet. I may not


One small detail: My worst UAD experiences occurred while having a dual partition ( one partition was a cloned OS meant for testing purposes).
My UAD situation has been worlds better when I ditched that approach and kept only one OS resident . I may never know if that was a factor, but I've always suspected that may have played a part.....

Billy Buck...Thanks for brainstorming...Sounds like you are a veteran. I've been using Cakewalk since the original pro audio so I've been around the block too. I know that we are rehashing a lot of things but I appreciate the effort because it helps me to consider what I may have overlooked. Sometimes it's something right under your nose and you just need someone to help you focus. Thanks.

another bit of info:

I've had several instances recently where I've had live snare and a (drumagog'ed) triggered snare sitting side by side in the mix.
I usually render the drumagog to an audio track, nudge it a bit so it's aligned with the original snare.

Anyhow....in mix I'll insert an 1176 on that triggered snare audio track, and the latency between it and the real live track is distracting.
I always have to nudge that triggered snare ahead on the timeline to make it feel right with the live one. And that's just on a track level....

It almost sounds like you're doing a "NY compression" thang where you're mixing the compressed version with the clean one.
The UAD latency may keep fighting you on that unless you render all elements to their own track and then nudge the UAD track to compensate for the latency.

Prolly not the workaround you were envisioning ...but it works.