jb101
As I said in post four, try disabling all effects by pressing "E" on your computer keyboard.  Did you try this?
 
It doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, if it has any latency inducing effects on a track or bus, it will induce latency, unless it is capable of time travel.

Absolutely, by bypassing any and all plugins you narrow down to a I/O issue or actual plugin latency. If it goes away after bypassing all plugins, slowly introduce each plugin back in one by one testing the playback to find the culprit.

jb101
As I said in post four, try disabling all effects by pressing "E" on your computer keyboard.  Did you try this?
 
It doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, if it has any latency inducing effects on a track or bus, it will induce latency, unless it is capable of time travel.

Absolutely, by bypassing any and all plugins you narrow down to a I/O issue or actual plugin latency. If it goes away after bypassing all plugins, slowly introduce each plugin back in one by one testing the playback to find the culprit.

jb101
As I said in post four, try disabling all effects by pressing "E" on your computer keyboard.  Did you try this?
 
It doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, if it has any latency inducing effects on a track or bus, it will induce latency, unless it is capable of time travel.

Absolutely, by bypassing any and all plugins you narrow down to a I/O issue or actual plugin latency. If it goes away after bypassing all plugins, slowly introduce each plugin back in one by one testing the playback to find the culprit.

This is just to ask if it happens after working a while?
I get a delay that starts to happen after working for a while (particularly in Audiosnap) and it goes away if I reboot the program.
I've noticed it's a warning that, if I ignore, ends in a lockup.
But then I'm on XP and X1
 

M_Glenn_M
This is just to ask if it happens after working a while?
I get a delay that starts to happen after working for a while (particularly in Audiosnap) and it goes away if I reboot the program.
I've noticed it's a warning that, if I ignore, ends in a lockup.
But then I'm on XP and X1

I'm on Win 7 x64 and Sonar X2a.  I too experience a playback delay sometimes after working for a bit.  The playback verticle line motion also gets choppy in this scenario. And Sonar does lockup often, for no apparent reason.  Another user referred to it as a "white-out".  I did a complete X2a uninstall/reinstall (no fun!), and still get white-outs on the fresh install.  Still waiting in more suggestions from tech support.

M_Glenn_M
This is just to ask if it happens after working a while?
I get a delay that starts to happen after working for a while (particularly in Audiosnap) and it goes away if I reboot the program.
I've noticed it's a warning that, if I ignore, ends in a lockup.
But then I'm on XP and X1
 

That's a good observation. I "think" I've experienced this before, where working a long time in one project/song starts degrading in performance, but most times, it's because I'm adding more plug-ins, or tweaking in Audio-Snap without bouncing the results to clips. One thing I do, is close the project every once in a while. in case there's some kind of memory-leak, or somehow I've accidentally done something odd. I think by hanging up the phone so-to-speak, the session is closed completely, and can be totally re-opened fresh.

I don't know if this really helps, but I feel like it does. Even sometimes closing X2 and starting it again, or even rebooting the entire machine. Starting with a clean slate I think has stability benefits.

Beepster
Does it happen ALL the time or just when you haven't pressed play for a while? Like I said, when my hard drive falls asleep it causes a lag. That's a Windows Power Management/Hard Disk Management issue. Most "optimization" guides have a section of setting things so the hard drives stay active and ready at all times.

On a newly created project with just one audio track, no effects, or softsynths, WDM driver mode, playback buffer set to 128 samples, Open All Devices not checked...I still get the slight delay upon playback. 
 
I brought up this issue because on an earlier Win7 32 bit, Quad Core CPU, Sonar X2a playback was instantaneous :)
 
I remember in the good old days of S8.5, someone mentioned some tweaks in the aud.ini file to improve performance...just wondering if this would apply to SX2a?

have you tried your buffers in queue ?
try lowering them from 256 to 128.
 
cheers man.

Are you sure?  I would have thought setting Buffers in Queue to 128 would increase latency. My Buffers in Playback Queue is set to 2.
 
Buffer size varies from system to system.  Just try lowering them as far as they'll go when tracking to reduce latency.  You can always raise them when mixing, as latency is no longer an issue.
 
Has anything else changed since your old system?

Do you have a virus scanner running? Is there any chance that the Windows Scanner is trying to save you from yourself or checking to ensure the file you are accessing doesn't need to be scanned? This is a Wild A. Guess, but thought I'd throw it out there. I haven't seen it in the thread above.
 
If you don't have 3rd Party virus software installed, and you are using Windows 7 or 8, you should be able to hit the windows button and type virus scanner to find it. Then you can disable it at least temporarily to rule it out. Usually, for me, the Windows Virus scanner hurts me when I hit stop after making a long recording. Let's say i record 10 tracks for an hour and then hit stop... the Windows Virus Scanner starts ensuring there are no viruses in those enormous wave field. You can set exclusion directories... but when I'm making recordings I care about, I always disable it. I've never had a problem with the scanner when it wasn't running. :-)