Can't get latency down

Hi everyone!

After years of working on a Mac and cursing about Logic I finally got a PC again and since I have such fond memories of the very first Sonar, I thought maybe I can finally move back and gave it a go!

But my problem is this: I can't get latency down! Please someone point me in the right direction. I beg you.


I'm on Windows 8 with the Sonar X2 Trial. I have onboard sound, a Soundblaster Recon3D PCIe as well as a Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 connected via Firewire (I used this one on the Mac and I'd like to use it here as well)


All I want is to play on my LDP8 pad controller without any audible latency. I've set the Driver Mode to ASIO, set up the Saffire in ASIO4ALL - In Sonar's Preferences it says ASIO Reported Latency is 4.2ms for Input/Output and 8.3ms for Roundtrip.


As far as I can tell there is no MIDI Latency (If I look at the the MIDI signals of the LPD8 in midi-ox they appear instantly when I press the pads), but if I try to play in Sonar I have so much latency, it's unplayable. :(


Any ideas what might be wrong? Thanks so much for your help!

I got it to work after all! 

For the record: Driver Mode WDM/KS without Multiprocessing and MMCSS gives me 10ms latency on the Saffire and I can now play on the LPD8 with no noticable delay, yay!

The culprit may have been the number of soundcards. ASIO can only run one soundcard at a time unless they're identical.

The reported roundtrip  latency of  8.3 ms is excellent. You don't say how big (approximately) the unusable latency was. Note, that ASIO4ALL is not an ASIO driver, but a WDM-wrapper. I assume there's native ASIO-drives for the Saffire.

Could it be SONAR wasn't actually using the Saffire and that very low reported latency, but some other card?