Cactus Music - preach it, brother. It's unfortunate so many people buy a new computer with great hardware, only to be torpedoed by the included software.
 
My poor mom wanted to learn computers and bought a Compaq. She would call me with all these tales of woe, incredibly slow operation, etc. etc. One day I was visiting and poked around. There was a trial version of Norton anti-virus installed. I uninstalled it, but while better it still didn't seem right. I poked around the Norton web site and after digging through way too many pages, found an essentially hidden section on how to do a complete uninstall of Norton. After doing that, the computer ran fast and smooth. 

A new computer is like a new car. With an old car, the kinds of things that fail (belts, gaskets, filters, hoses, brakes, fluids) are mostly predictable. With a new car, the engine could fall out.
 
The biggest problem with new computers is the superfluous crapware they come pre-installed with. Whenever dropouts occur and the CPU isn't near capacity, it's usually some other software that's at fault. Wi-fi is the #1 culprit on laptops, but anti-virus "real time protection" is another. Windows itself performs a lot of tasks you don't need, some of which can gobble resources (mostly I/O), such as search indexing. All of this stuff is enabled by default, and it can take awhile to clean up a new computer.
 
Start with LatencyMon. If you're lucky, it'll quickly point you to the culprit(s).

I just looked up that Acer model, and though it is a desktop, which normally wouldn't come with any native built-in WiFi capabilities, this one has some kind of built-in wireless charging system, and it may have some sort of WiFi transceiver built in.
 
IF that is the case, you could see a WiFi device driver in Windows Device Drivers, and WiFi drivers and/or the physical transceiver frequently interfere with a computer's ability to handle the streaming audio demands of music applications such as Sonar.
 
to the original poster - IF you look in Windows Device Drivers, and see any WiFi or wireless devices, I would suggest you disable them (NOT uninstall) - by right-clicking on the wireless driverm and then clicking on Disable.  That will then spawn a pop up telling you that when you disable a device driver that it will then not work.  That is an expected message, and you can just click OK.
 
When then done with your Sonar session, you can go back into Windows Device Drivers and right-click on the disable wireless driver, then click on Enable - which will turn the WiFi back on til next time you want to disable it.
 
Hope that helps, 
 
Bob Bone

I don't know if my experience with a Gateway PC (an Acer product) would help in this case. I had to check out several different USB port assignments for the keyboard,mouse and interface before it worked reliably without crackling.

Is your Power Plan set to High Performance?
 
R

Hi Guys. Thanks for all your help. I have been working through your suggestions and here is what I have found. A big problem here is that the fault is intermittent.
 
First I...
 
Updated R16 firmware, disabled Wifi, Bluetooth and all audio drivers I could find (ther than the R16)  removed McAfee. perhaps a moderate improvement but not much, problem definitely still persisting.
 
then I...
 
Ran LatencyMon, it basically came back with a report saying I shouldn't have latency problems. (although I did have some hard pagefault' s)
 
Set about uninstalling any apps that looked unnecessary, amazon, twitter etc. Again maybe a slight improvement but not much.
 
The magic bullet seemed to come when I changed to the high performance power plan as suggested by eikelbijiter.
 
The CPU usage as displayed in Sonar shot straight down.
 
I thought it was problem solved but the next time I started sonar the problem was back. I closed sonar, unplugged and re-plugged in the R16. When I opened up the my project everything was fine again.
 
There's now no doubt in my mind that this isn't the CPU overloading. Given that restarting the R16 seems to solve this, I think this must be a driver problem as suggested by several people.
 
Cactus Music, seem to suggest that I could use a different driver with the R16. I must admit I have know idea how to do this. I thought you had to use the driver that came with the interface.
 
Can anyone point me in the right direction for downloading a driver and setting this up?  

One thing I saw here the other day that helped on X2 was the cache read write buffer,
I always wondered why I'd have issues early during a recording.
Making sure it is turned off solved it!

The November update includes improved WASAPI support under windows 10. 
You can easily try it with no damage done. Just go to the Preferances/ Audio settings and change ASIO mode to WASAPI exclusive. 
See what happens. You can always switch back. 
I'm not optimistic that this will help as your right in that generally you should always use the ASIO driver that is supplied with your interface. I would not even suggest this but I have read of many Zoom owners having issues with the drivers on this forum . These things tend to be because possibly Sonar is a little more picky about drivers than other DAW and audio applications. 
 
But the best way to proove your issue is driver related would be to borrow a "known to be good" audio interface like a Tascam etc and see what happens... my guess would be smooth sailing. 

Tom7
 
When I record and often when I play back I get a lot of crackling and sometimes when monitoring too. I cant understand this. Usually I would say the cpu isn't coping but looking at the usage its hardly spiking and my new computer is much faster than my old one.
 

Have you ever tried recording with another piece of software? Did you get the same crackling?
 

+1 for the WASAPI driver suggestion. I recently bought a used Dell Latitude E6430 with an I7 processor and 8 gigs of RAM. The specs aren't spectacular, but it's a pretty solid machine (considering that I gave less than $200.00 for it). I'm running SPLAT and a host of 3rd party synths with no problem using the WASAPI driver. I'd think your machine would run well using that driver.