I finally built my new system I am little disappointed so far. I know I need to tweak it more but I have had the audio engine
stop on me a bunch of times. I am using a vantec firewire card with a TI chipset. the mackie blackbird control has a dpc checker. It recommends that I run it safe mode 2!!! Using a buffer size of 128 and running it in lowest latency mode seems to trigger the problem.
I have done some tweaking to my system. I used this as my guideline.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWith blackbird control set at 128 and lowest latency I was doing a simple one track stereo recording, no plug ins, the audio engine stopped several times. I had to set the blackbird to normal and buffer to 256. sonar platinum reports roudtrip latency at 13.2 ms with those settings. Shouldn't I be able to get it much faster than that?!!