Hi,

I notice that when I play trough my line6 xt pro direct to my interface, I get a decent good and clear sound coming out of my monitor speakers.
However, if I record this and then listen to the playback, I notice that the guitar tone are very high on the mids, and not so clear and airy in the high frequency as the sound that I hear in real time while playing.
I record at 24bit 48khz.

Anyone else experience this?

Are you input monitoring through SONAR or direct-monitoring through the interface? The latter will likely be a pure analog path, bypassing the interface's A/D/A converters, in which case the difference is likely due to converter quality (or lack thereof).
 
Input monitoring through SONAR should sound the same as recording and playback, but the act of performing and interacting with an instrument in real time can alter the listening experience. And if you're not monitoring with headphones, the combined sound from your monitors and direct sound from the guitar is going to sound different in the room than playback of the recorded DI sound only.

Hi, thanks for the reply but I'm not sure I understood the answer. I connect my guitar rig to the input 1&2 on my interface (motu896mk3). In sonar I choose the input directly from the motu ins, mono or 1&2 if I need a stereo track. So the sound is the same through my monitors all the time and also even if I'm just playing with my PC of.

If you can hear sound without activating the input echo on your audio tracks in Sonar, you are direct monitoring (via your interface control software) rather than monitoring through Sonar. 
 
 
https://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation?product=SONAR%20X2&language=3&help=Recording.22.html
 

Hmmmm, ok so that means that the weak spot can be the AD DA converters in my interface?

I wouldn't necessarily call it a weak spot - either way your interface is still doing the AD conversion. It just may explain why you are hearing a difference in your monitoring chain.

I came here to figure out the same thing. I'm monitoring from SONAR and for me there's a clear degradation from the monitored signal to the recorded one. I guess there could be some resampling of the signal from the one you hear while monitoring to the one that is actually recorded and played back later.
 
Anyone knows if SONAR handles internally high quality sampling to do the math on the signal that later could be downgraded to match the audio driver settings?
 
I use a Radial J48 --> A&H ZED R16 --firewire-ASIO 48/24-> NI Guitar Rig 5.
 
Any help would be appreciated.
 

Sonar's internal maths runs at 64 bit floating point - no chance of degradation there.

What you hear is what you recorded. Either there is something with the direct monitoring issue or your mind/ears are not hearing it the same while recording verses playback. At these sample rates and so on there is no difference that your ears should be able to discern.

Thanks for your answers. I'm going to setup a test to use other ears ;-)