hI
 
I Totally agree with the Grumbleweed 
I have a Focusrite Scarlet 6i6  at 6ms   and It It totally flawless
 
Everything now Is rosy in the garden
 
all the best
john
 
Ps make sure you have quality USB leads and right spec!!

I disabled my onboard sound and use my Scarlett interface for all sounds. Would this tweak affect me?
 
Still locking this away in the mind palace* for future study.
 
*my mind palace is currently a rusty storage shed infested with hamsters so not as impressive as it sounds. ;-)

A few months ago I had to replace some capacitors in the external audio dock. So I enabled, in BIOS, the on-board audio device for temp use.  After the repair I had not disabled it. It has seemed not to interfere, but,... whose nose?
 
Device manager:
Sound
HD audio device
 ms audio device
 
System
 HD audio device
 HD audio device
 
I did not disable in device manager. I restarted the comp and disabled the on-board audio device in BIOS.
 
And:
Device manager:
Sound
(gone)
 
System
 HD audio device   (only one)
 
 
I disabled this and rebooted. 
 
Now let the cartoons begin.
 
 

Yo Craig
 
I have been using and supporting computers for nearly 30 years.
 
I never had looked for an audio device in the system area.  Excellent observing.

I disabled the exact component in device manager and a few things got better immediately. My meters resumed working when Pro Channel was engaged, and I can go down to 64 samples now with no crackling.

+ 1 more tester, windows 7/64bit, rate 192, 49 samples.
thanks Anderton & fingers crossed for my 3,4ms (!) roundtrip...yes Sir
 

Thedoccal
I disabled the exact component in device manager and a few things got better immediately. My meters resumed working when Pro Channel was engaged, and I can go down to 64 samples now with no crackling.

It's very cool other people are noticing a difference. Let me re-iterate this isn't about the interface, I had similarly sluggish results with all the audio interfaces I've tested with this particular system (yes, including Focusrite). This is apparently about some negative AMD graphics card audio driver mojo that, once disabled, gave rock-solid stability and cut latency by over 90% (projects I used to have to run at 512 now run at 48 samples). Here's what I'm mostly curious about now:
 
1. Do drivers that come with other brands of graphics cards, if disabled, provide an improvement?
2. Do the people who have the same stability symptoms - Sonar freezes, can't turn it off in Task Manager, reboot required - have those problems go away if an identical or similar driver is disabled?
 
I really can't get over the difference, it's huge.
 
 

Paul P
Thanks for this !
 
I also have the AMD HDA-device.  However, I can disable it, and just did as I don't need it.
I don't have it appearing under System Devices.

 
Interestingly, after the next power off/power on cycle, the driver had re-installed itself. However when it did, this time it included an option to disable. So I disabled it and disabled the one under System Devices. We'll see what happens tomorrow when the computer gets turned on.
 

Anderton
The fix: In my computer's Device Manager under System Devices, there's an entry titled High Definition Audio Controller. I was able to disable it, and poof - the AMD High Definition Audio Device disappeared from Sound, Video, and Game Controllers. Since disabling this, Sonar has run flawlessly for two days straight on two different CPU-heavy projects with a 48 sample buffer!
 

I recently did a clean install of both Windows 7 and Sonar X3 after running into some weird latency issues. I discovered the initial problems were caused by some files that were restored from an earlier back up. Rather than continue to trouble shoot I decided to wipe everything clean and start over again. I too disabled both the Realtek High Definition Audio Driver and AMD High Definition Audio Device and Sonar X3 runs better than ever. Very happy here as well.

Beepster
Would this tweak affect me?

 
Well, the culprit in question is the AMD audio for their graphics cards' hdmi (I believe).
 
I have a feeling onboard sound may not be the same sort of thing, but maybe.  I left my realtek onboard active as it gets used when everything is turned off and I just want windows sounds.
 
This issue could certainly use a bit of scientific investigation.