I do not have Win8. The laptop must have some audio control software especially since it has an enhanced audio system.

JB: Thanks! Hahaha so we're the lone ones that do it that way eh? I don't know what made me do it like that...but since Cake 9 I've done it that way and it's never let me down. Glad I'm not the only one. :)

Spitfire: So sorry it didn't work out for you. It may be something related to Win 8. I don't use that here, so unfortunately I'm out of ideas brother. It may be in your best interest to give Sonar support a call today if you can at like 1 pm eastern standard time. I called a few times and the wait time was 5 minutes or less. Yesterday I called and it was 2 minutes, so they might be able to help you with this.

Chuck: Thanks brother. I'm sure it's the same as what you're doing, but you're doing it the right way. LOL! Your stuff always sounds great, so stick with it man. Then again, it's always cool to try something new just to see if there are any differences. My pleasure to try and help. :)

-Danny

Hey guys... thanks for all your help. I actually found it wasn't a problem with SONAR or (to my great surprise) even my mixdown. My HP envy m4 laptop (yeah, I know... but I like composing on the go and, more importantly, I don't have the budget or the space for a full desktop rig with studio equipment. But I will one day...) came with an IDT High Definition Audio Driver... which, through looking at other forums, I realized had some built-in bleed and overdrive which resulted in very high, pushed mixes and loss of stereo quality, as I mentioned before. So I uninstalled the bugger and my computer released it with a regular 'High Definition Audio' driver. And now everything plays back more or less dead-on. Still, though, thanks for all of your help, and ESPECIALLY to Danny Danzi for going through the trouble to do a video. You guys rock. -71

Hi Spitfire,

You're welcome and I'm glad you figured it out. Just a word of advice. Since you are using the built in sound, you will most likely experience latency (delay where when you play something and try to record it, it plays late) due to not having a real recording card in your machine.

In this situation, you could use a driver package called ASIO4ALL which will fool your stock card into thinking it's an ASIO driven card. This still eliminate any latency issues you may be having during recording. I use ASIO4ALL drivers on all my stock Dell machines that use Realtek HD cards in them. It works so well, it's like having a pro recording card in those machines. The only drawbacks are, they will not record anything other than 16/44 and of course you don't have loads of inputs to choose from.

But I definitely recommend looking into this if by chance you are noticing extreme latency, which by rights, you should since the stock cards are forced to use WDM or MME mode in Sonar. Just figured I'd pass that on to you. Good luck and I'm glad you got things working brother. :)

-Danny

Yep. I know all about ASIO4ALL. I've actually been using it this entire time in my DAWs. It's just that I don't believe it works on playback programs like WMP and iTunes. It switches to the default driver and it was the default driver that was given me. I'm not gonna pretend to be an audio expert, but I have taken a couple of classes, and whoever the heck set up the drivers on this computer was obviously from the modern "LOUDER IS BETTER" school of thinking... which I don't subscribe to. Comparing the two, you're talking probably a gain of at LEAST 15-20dB, really hard compression and stereo bleed. It's like the audio version of trying to force a watermelon through a funnel at a high rate of speed. :-\ I'm just glad I was able to fix it through uninstalling the driver. I got this computer in the first place to be able to do more composing/production stuff with the better specs. My old computer: Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB RAM (I later upgraded to 6), and 320GB HD. My new computer: Intel i7, 8GB RAM, 1TB HD. So, suffice it to say, if that driver issue would've been a persistent thing, I wouldn't have been too happy. :(