Dappa1
Have you tried Studio One?

You mean, have I tested this scenario with another DAW as a reference to rule out Sonar being the culprit? Not yet, but I plan to take that to task if I've tackled some lower-hanging fruit first.

10 to 1 it's a plug like Transient Shaper using a lookahead buffer that adds latency for which SONAR compensates by adding delay to all other tracks so they'll sync with the track being delayed by the plug-in. This is called Plug-in Delay Compensation.
 
So long as the plug-in adding latency isn't on the track that you want to input monitor, you can hit the PDC button in the Mix module of the Control Bar, and delay compensation will not be applied to tracks with input monitoring enabled.
 
 

So, that's what's interesting: Even with the transport stopped, and not using any plug-ins on the Vocal buss, I'm still hearing 50-100ms latency in the Sonar X2 echo. What I have to rule out is whether I really have an issue in hardware, or if the Echo function is adding some delay.
 
To add, here's something of a buggy thing: Sometimes, after hitting record, then stop, with the Echo/Monitor button enabled, Echo stops. Sometimes I have to click Play, then Stop again to get the Echo back.

Two things I had to do to get Sonar X2 to play nice which I never had to do in any previous version of Sonar was to bump up the midi buffer and set the Playback Timing Master to MOTU 1/2 and the Record Timing Master to MOTU 3/4.
 

(1) I love 'em to death but I find my FabFilter plugins always cause me dropouts.
 
(2) Oddly, I haven't had unidentifiable  drop out problems for over a year or so but today - bloody awful. Only 24 audio tracks, no plugins and all I wanted to do was mix down in real time.  After trying the usual tweaks and getting nowhere I changed the Playback I/O Buffer size from 256 (where it's been for at least a year) to 512 and that seems to have solved it.  I'm still perturbed that this problem should rear its head now for no apparent reason.  

I have to routinely set my buffers to 512, or even 1024 to handle some of the plug-ins I use for mixing. But it's the joy of playing in the box. Seems to be slightly worse since the X2a release update, but it still handles a pretty heavy load.

Virus scanners and Windows defender can add overhead that can cause dropouts. I always disable them and disable windows updates or disconnect from the network. If you are on a laptop with a battery, turn on presentation mode on Windows eight.

In light of what brconflict just wrote, would it be better to regress to Sonar X2, before the X2a update?
I've noticed a few functionalities disappeared when I went to X2a, and now I'm really wondering if
X2 (before X2a) is more stable?
 
Thoughts?
Coreysan

robert_e_bone
If your project has ANY plugins that are meant for post-tracking (mixing, mastering), then they will affect latency and cause dropouts.  There is a list floating around out there with exactly which plugins to avoid using during recording, but I don't have time to look for it at the moment.
 

 
Do you have any tips on finding said list? I would love to take a look at it.

You're always going to have significant and unavoidable latency recording with a computer. It's just how the scheme works: computers don't do anything in real time and cannot process data in real time, so the data must be buffered, the CPU must switch between multiple tasks, and disk drive operations have to be scheduled for efficiency. Nothing ever happens right now. On top of that, ADC dictates that the total latency through your signal chain will always be equal to or greater than the latency of your slowest component.
 
All you can do is ignore the computer's latency. You do this by monitoring the input side using your interface's so-called "zero latency" monitoring feature. If you must have an echo effect during tracking, use an external hardware device rather than an ITB DSP process. Your new recording will of course still be out of step with what was previously recorded, but the computer will calculate and compensate for that, so that in the end you needn't care about latency.
 
None of this is just some theoretical mind-exercise to me: my DAW is an aged dual-core Pentium 4. I know about latency! And yet, I still manage to record just fine. This is do-able because I don't monitor the source that's being recorded through the computer.