Level setting problem with Pro Audio 9

[MrKwik]

Please bear with me as I'm pretty damn new to this. Here is my basic setup. I'm trying to lay down some drum tracks. I'm using 2 overheads, a close mic on the snare and one on the kick. I'm running through a Behringer 2004A mixer that has 4 output buses. I have the overheads on the 1/2 busses and the snare/kick on the 3/4 buses. My PC has 2 standard sound cards. Im trying to get 4 seperate drum tracks at one time, so I have the 1/2 bus going to the line in on one card and the 3/4 bus to the other card.

Here is my issue: when I solo each channel to set the gains, they have to be all the way down but the levels look about right to me at that setting so I guess that is OK. Then I use the sliders to set the level of each channel. Now when I arm a channel in PA9, the meter reads about halfway up and just kinda hovers there at like -24db. The slightest hit will peg the meter and playing with the slider on PA9 doesnt seem to really make a difference. If I adjust the bus sliders on the mixer way down (I mean like 1/5th the way up), then a nornal hit will just barely send the meter on PA9 into the orange, but the meter is always half way up no matter what. Am I doing something terribly wrong here or is this normal?

[moskus]

Is the volume low when you record?



And just one thing that you will find when you record over a longer time-periode, say 4 minutes. The tracks will start to drift apart if your two soundcard isn't synced to the same clock.

[MrKwik]

Well I'm not really sure about the volume to be honest because I'm also having a bit of a monitoring issue. It sounds like garbage but its doing that even when I play a CD. Still trying to figure that out.

Can the cards be synced or is that somethig built into the card. They are two different brand of card.

[moskus]

My guess is that they can't be sync'ed...