Thanks Tim no surprise that the RME would be spot on. 
The people who need to pay attention are the ones using interfaces of a lesser quality. 
I just installed my old Creative Audigy 2 in a beater desktop and will be testing it when I get a chance. 
 

We've discussed this (almost ad nauseam) in the past.
But it IS important.
I've got a cwb file that explains how to do it if you're interested.
get it here
BTW my RME UFX and Tascam FW-1884 (these drivers were written by Frontier) are spot on
sample accurate!
Just for S&G I went back and re-tested the FW-1884;
64, 128 and 256 are spot on sample accurate
At 2048 it is off by 1 sample
The RME is spot on 48 to 2048 (that would be in X3, haven't got Platinum on the Studio DAW yet)
 
Tom

Thanks Tom.. I realize this topic might have been covered but it's sort of hard to find. Even a Google search of Audio-Interface-Offset or reported Latency, will take you to mostly other DAW forums. Hard to find any solid info. 
 
There are sooooo many threads where we talk about this interface or that interface and these day's everyone believes they have it under control if they can get under 5 ms of RTL. 
 
There's even people using interfaces which have no ASIO drivers and they will say " Seems to work great for me" And when some of us try to hand out the best advice we can offer to those people having issues with audio which is " Buy an audio interface with good ASIO drivers" there is always someone who chimes in to contradict the facts and say that there is nothing wrong with using an on board sound card WDM or MME etc, etc. 
 
This timing offset seems to be a USB audio interface issue as far as I can see. My reading seems to discover this issue is most often rare with PCI cards. Not sure about Firewire haven't seen enough evidence yet but my guess is they do much better than USB. 
 
It's something to do with the ASIO driver having a safety or a hidden buffer that does not always get reported to the DAW. It even exists in the Mac world. Lots of threads in the Logic and Pro tools forums about having to manually adjust for offset. 
And all the DAW help files take this very lightly and don't push the point. The instructions are a little buried and vague. 
 
So even though I personally have a good working system my goal here was to provide some sort of conclusion of what interfaces can truly be recommended in the lower price point bracket. 
I bet it's a none issue with over $500 PCI and firewire devices. 
 
 

Johnny,
What may be the "mother of all threads is here.
Proper "sync" is an absolute must, and most are barely (if at all) cognizant of how it works.
Danny Danzi did a video tutorial at one time, can't remember if its in the above thread or not.
My Tascam FW-1884 is, of course, a firewire device and has always been spot on; Sonar 7 through
to Platinum; well except at 2048, then it is one sample off.
I'm running the UFX on the USB buss, its "spot on" 48 to 2048. But that's RME's forte; drivers, drivers, drivers.
There were sync issues beginning in X1, but this was a Sonar problem if you "Looped and Punched In".
Each successive "take" was placed later and later. Other than that, sync is "tight as a tick"!
I never could find the rhyme or reason; the "hidden" buffers maybe?
As to the "search" function of the forum; I'll leave that to another thread.
Its always baffled me that Cake does not have a definitive white paper on the "how and why" of proper sync.
Maybe it would just create a huge "support" issue?
For the most part the forum members seem to help one another to get it sorted.
Thanks for bringing it up; we need a "sticky" that lays out the "facts" and loses the "noise".
T

Thanks again Tom, That was a blast from the past thread , wow BaMIDI ( Billy)  who is sadly no longer with us. 
Boy a lot has changed since then but then a lot has stayed the same. You can see that good audio interfaces and drivers where still allusive. That was in my Sound Blaster days and you can see that many were using asio4all in attempts to make things work. 
Speaking of Sound Blasters, I think I'll go test that old machine we just rebuilt and installed the Audigy II card in. I'll have to install X3 first. 

Please check my sig.
Cheers:)

Hmmm, that almost suggests that the Saffire is optimized to run at higher sampling rates.

So for all you Sound Blaster fans out there I have good news in ASIO mode it surprised me and passed the test. WDM mode was a train wreck. WDM mode is now officially banned from my list of audio driver options. read on
I had not bothered with the Centrance or Oblique Audio RTL test as what is documented by people is it will only show you what Sonar will also show you so really doesn't add much. Only thing is it will do this without the need to even open Sonar. All you need is the loop back cables and hit the button. There is some fussing with selecting the proper in/outs. 
Any how it's free and works outside Sonar, you can use it to compare Sonars results. 
http://www.oblique-audio.com/free/rtlutility
 

 
It showed 5804 samples and Sonar showed 5860 that's 1 ms off. 
 

Now Notice the Buffer size of 2980 but the Oblique test shows this at 2880. Is this our hidden buffer?? 
 

 
But oddly enough the Audigy was actually within a few samples when I zoomed in. I counted 28.  

 
So ASIO was totally fine and it was stable over a 3 minute period. No so with WDM. 
As you can see above it was early which seems to be normal for WDM but it drifted after only 15 measures  by 24 samples, It kept drifting throughout the 3 minutes. No 2 hits were the same. 

 

So some details. This Sound Blaster Audigy II is a PCI card with a front panel break out box. The computer is an AMD 3.4 tri core ( that's right 3 cores) with 3 Gigs of RAM and running W7 64 bit. DPCLAT tested under 60ms with Sonar running. 
I used Sonar 8.5 because it is much better for screen shots. X3 is grey and ugly. There were drivers for W7 64 bit but not Windows 8. I think they have been vastly improved since I last used it in XP 32 bit. In XP I could not seem to get ASIO to ever work and was using MME mode with Sonar. That was 2008. I bought an M audio fast track to fix my issues.. 
I messed around in ASIO mode and had no problems. I set the buffer high at 60 ms for the test but It seemed stable even down at 10 ms. 
So  WDM mode was terrible over all. First the Audio engine kept stopping when I tried to record? Didn't do this in ASIO mode ever. And there's no way one could work with the drift. What is worth note here is that so many people are told to use WDM mode or worse asio4all which is not asio but a WDM wrapper. I'm not about to trash my computer to test asio4all I leave that for someone braver than me. 


 
I can't see any correlation between the Oblique test and Sonars report, and the recording drifted so muck no numbers could be applied with any accuracy.   
 

Mine was set ages ago, but this is a good reminder to check it again since I've just this past weekend finished rebuilding windows on a new OS drive for this computer.  I doubt my latency offset was transferred to the new install of sonar, so I need to check that.