Was just checking and the MOTU website just announced a beta release of the new Windows Thunderbolt ASIO drivers for the AVB family and a rewrite of the USB driver as well.   This will be interesting over the next few days.  Beta - blessing or curse...   We will see.
 
Take care
 
LL     

I just tried these. The firmware update and driver install went fine
BUT
they don't have the "USB Streaming Mode" settings any more - so you can't set the "hidden" buffer settings. You can only choose your buffer size and it's in the web interface now - no more control panel.
 
This is not progress. At 128 samples, my RTL is  11.6ms instead of 7.8ms that it used to be.
 
My PC (for some reason) pukes with a 64 sample setting.
 
I logged an incident with MOTU support - if I can "downgrade" the firmware - I'd be better off going back to the old firmware and driver...

UPDATE:
In case anyone's interested - you *can* downgrade the firmware. I just installed the 1.2.5 again, like it was an "update" and it worked fine. Then I uninstalled the new driver and installed the old one (1.6) and everything works fine ;-)
 
I don't think that taking away our ability to set the "hidden" buffers is progress
 

jbraner
I don't think that taking away our ability to set the "hidden" buffers is progress

+1001
Removing the ability to minimize round-trip latency is NOT moving forward.
 
The previous MOTU Firewire units initially offered a 32-sample ASIO buffer size.
MOTU removed it in later driver versions... (which was also a step backwards).
 

The new windows drivers let you go way down to 24 or 16 samples - but that's no good if your PC can't cope.
 
I might be able to play around with BIOS settings or something (God knows I've tried everything I can think of in Windows) to get my PC to "paly" with 64 sample buffers - but it's easier to just go with 128 samples and the "minimum latency" setting (the lowest of the "USB Streaming Mode" settings)
 
I raised a ticket with them - so we'll see what tMOTU say. It *is* a beta driver...

UPDATE:

I opened a ticket with MOTU (over the weekend), and tthey got right back to me today (Monday)
They gave me an email address to contact - and I got a reply back within minutes. Here's what they said

"Hi John,

Thanks for reaching out.

Yes, this is something we are actively looking into, and we’ll be sure to put together a good solution for this in the upcoming beta build.

Many thanks for your time and feedback!"

What they're talking about is putting back the USB streaming mode settings aka hidden buffer settings.
I'm optimistic ;-)

There are some new drivers and firmware and now you can change buffer size AND "Host Safety Offset".
No more control panel - it's all changed in the web interface.
Both buffer size and host safety offset go down to 8 samples! This shows up as 0.7ms RTL (!) in SONAR - and is, of course, unusable - for me anyway.
 
I'm not really able to get lower latencies with this driver - but between the two settings, you can make changes in much smaller increments, so it might help everyone get settings that are "just right".
 
I also think that maybe some combinations might be better than others (eg is it better to set lower buffer settings and higher offset, or higher buffer size and lower offset? you could achieve the same latency with various combinations like this). My PC just does not like buffer size of 64 samples. The ampsim channels just go berserk and seem to self oscillate - in to the red!
 
So the new beta driver is much more configurable than the last one. We're on the right track now.
Maybe at some point we can get to gether and work out optimal combinations of settings - but it may vary for everybody's PC and what they're using in SONAR etc.