FYI I'm pretty sure Ableton Live's stretching is also based on zPlane. I find the Radius algorithm perfectly acceptable for most applications, and there's acidization when I need to mess with beats. But, don't forget that you can also buy elastique as a plug-in and use it within Sonar if you prefer their stretching algorithm.

@Avoica... You can take everything Anderton says as definitive. He is the creator of the Sonar Advanced Workshop vids and writes for SOS. His stuff has helped me (and many others) immensely. Google Craig Anderton Sonar and you'll have a plethora of resource material. Another poster here to watch for is Garrigus (Scott). He writes the Sonar Power Books which are awesome. As I said this forum is a major bonus to owning Sonar but all the resource material for the programs out their written by fellows like Scott and Craig makes the learning experience far less painful than other programs.

Intel Quad Core i7-3612QM Ivy Bridge 2.10GHz (up to 3.10GHz) 6MB Cache  8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM 1GB AMD Radeon HD7670M Graphics 1TB 5400RPM Internal HD Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

Might want to get a few 7200rpm drives and use the 5400 for backup.

Oh yeah, I missed that. 7200 RPM is the way to go for programs and audio data. Bulk storage doesn't matter. I snagged a couple of Caviar Blacks for my system. They're great.

Oh, I am familiar with Craig Anderton! I live in the UK and back in the late 90's, I had Keyboard Magazine imported from the US at my local newsagents, so have read many of his articles before and know they are always in depth and accurate.

I'm going to pick up a training DVD to get myself into the software faster, though (luckily), I do have 25 years of experience with just about every other music making software you can think of, so I don't think I should find it too difficult! Being totally honest, Sonar never appealed until I first saw X1 - it always looked far too cluttered and complex - so I stuck to the Mac using mostly a combo of Reason, Pro Tools, Live and Logic, but X2 really tempted me so much more that I felt I just had to get my hands on it. I've always used Roland synths (had 56 of them since '87) and I want to get back into those as well as just using plugins all the time.

It's good to know that I can use Elastique as a plugin in Sonar, as from what I've heard, I do prefer it.

On the subject of the audio HD's, is USB 3 a good option, as the Dell I'm getting does not have FireWire.

Also, I have noticed a vast number of topics on this forum about latency - why is that - as in so many of the Cake TV videos I've seen, they constantly talk about "super low latency", yet there's a lot of people here (some with very powerful 12-Core PC's) who can't seem to achieve it? What's the secret?  

Thank you all again for your help and support, this really is a friendly place to be!