Mark Your Calendar

Be it known that Monday, June 25th of 2007 was a mighty, mighty day.

Shortly after the joyous resurrection of the motorcycle my good friend, fellow motorcycle enthusiast, fellow musician and producer/engineer extraordinaire Mr. Scott Cann arrived to have a look-see at my recording setup. A couple of hours of trial & error later, the DAW was working flawlessly and--best of all--with virtually ZERO LATENCY.

Well, technically it's about 1.0 - 1.5 milliseconds, but that may as well be 0.0 as far as human ears are concerned.

For anyone reading this who may be interested in the technical details of the fix, basically what it came down to was removing the computer sound card from the signal path altogether. By attempting to monitor recording/playback through the computer speakers I was inviting latency and a host of other problems into the scenario.

This is how it runs now:

M-Audio NRV10 --(via FireWire)--> Computer/Sonar 6.0 --(via FireWire)--> M-Audio NRV10--> Headphones/Monitors

In essence, I'm relying on FireWire's (and my 3G processor's) inherent speed to allow me to monitor signal coming back out from Sonar and into the mixer. No sound card to slow down the signal.

Some other changes we made included the following (all of which are found under Options --> Audio Options in Sonar):

• Playback Timing Master and Record Timing Master were set to the same channel on the NRV10, rather than the soundcard. Because it's poop.
• We turned off Read Caching and Write Caching entirely after finding that this process was introducing digital noise (intermittent ticking sounds) while recording. Again, turning this off means I'm relying on my processor and RAM to do the heavy lifting rather than using caching to lighten the load. We're not sure why it caused noise but for now the problem is solved. There's the possibility that shutting off caching might cause problems with larger, multitrack files later on but we'll worry about that when the time comes.
• Turned off the 64-bit Double Precision Engine (didn't need it anyway, as I'm not running a 64-bit version of XP). Duh.
• Changed the sample rate to 44,100 because there's really no need to go higher for what I'm doing.
• Drank some Dos Equis
• Ate blue corn chips, bean & corn salsa and habanero cheese.
• Also, not sure if this made a difference, but Scott gave my motorcycle a test drive and gave it the thumbs up. I don't know. Could be a contributing factor.

Thank you very much, Scott. You're the man.

KASTLE TESLA CRACKLES WITH POWER.