Teksonik will be along soon with one of his obsessive rants about people obsessing about specs, if we're not careful..

As someone else has already pointed out, you have a monster mid-tower machine, but the only drive with a direct connection to your MB is an SSD. Why do you have external drives on that machine? How are your external drives connected--USB (direct or via hub, all to same USB controller), eSATA, other? Can you run Sonar and all your plugins without them? What are the drive speeds? Are they power saving (green) drives or enclosures?
 
Since this is a purpose built audio machine, I assume we can skip the usual worries about a wireless network, incompatible video card or driver etc. If you can run your machine without the externals without a problem, then that would speak to the problem being there.

I just got some help on this: http://forum.cakewalk.com/WmiPrvSE-is-causing-I-spoke-to-soon-It-seems-that-my-USB-hubs-SOLVED-m2857812.aspx
 
I was getting spikes when running DPC Latency checker. I tried this and that but after getting excellent help I went in Device Manager and disabling everything under network adapters. Just try disabling everything there, you can enable them when you get through. After doing this I was getting an absolute maximum μs of 148. This after running DPC for about 5 minutes. Most of the time I was running between 90μs and 108μs which is pretty excellent for an off the shelf laptop.
I hope this helps.
 
Julien

Hey... sorry, I missed this.
 
I have spent 1 whole week of my life trying to single out any hardware/software issue on my machine that may be causing problems and found that MAYBE it was my network adaptors causing a few spikes now and again. However, with them completely disabled - no improvement.
 
Maybe it will help someone else. I am going to follow this thread. I'm sure I wil get some help here too!
 
Best to you and sorry, I skimmed the OP.
 
J

jb101
Teksonik will be along soon with one of his obsessive rants about people obsessing about specs, if we're not careful..

Beat me to it Jonathan

First, as was already mentioned, check your system's DPC latency.
If the machine exhibits large spikes, you need to resolve that issue.
 
Don't know what motherboard is in your machine.  It's possible the Audiophile 192 is in a bridged PCI slot (which can cause issues).
Do you have the external HDs connected to a USB3 controller?
It's possible that a drive is running in PIO mode (which can kill performance).
 

Hi guys. Just as an update, I have installed home studio 7xl in my new machine. I am very familiar with it having used it on my old machine. It is working solid as a rock. Even dimension pro works great. Even huge projects work great.
What does this eliminate? Sound card? Devices?

@jb101 - I only provided the snippet of specs to make sure they were seen, and not to poke sticks at Chuck.  And, the poster had not listed things like record bit-depth, sample rate in Sonar, or audio interface settings, or even driver mode, for that matter.  
 
I also frequently find it easier to diagnose issues when I have a clear image in my head of what the setup and system is, although needing that info certainly depends on the issue and is not universally required to provide meaningful assistance.
 
I don't need to know why you two have issues between you - I would only point out that when you two get to going at it, it disrupts the thread at hand, which makes it harder to provide assistance, and is also not particularly fair to the original poster.
 
I have been an unwilling participant in email/thread wars in the past, and really have no interest in them whatsoever, at this point in life.
 
Bob Bone
 

I don't know but if I were you I would try a clean install of X2 Producer... just to see.
 
J

I don't think this suggestion has been made yet, but perhaps investigate the following to rule it out.
 
Edit > Preferences > MIDI - Playback and Recording
 
Crank the "Prepare Using ___ Millisecond Buffers" from 250 to 500.
 
I believe we reduced the default setting in SONAR X2 (don't quote me I'm recalling from memory at the moment ;). That might explain a difference between SONAR HS7 XL and SONAR X2. More info on the setting here: http://www.cakewalk.com/Documentation/default.aspx?Doc=SONAR%20X2&Lang=EN&Req=Dialogs2.060.html
 
Worth ruling out at least.