Hello everybody,
i'm experiencing quite the same problem with my Axiom49 Masterkeyboard an cubase 5/64 on Vista.
I still have no solution but as it appears, the Internet hat no useful suggestions on this issue and everybody ist guessing what could .. or might .. So i want to share my findings.
It seems NOT to be a Latency Problem emerging from the MIDI or Sound card Drivers. I've done a couple of tests with different Keyboards and MIDI Interfaces and the negative Offset for a certain VST Instrumeent remained static at 55 to 60 miliseconds.
I think it is an erraneous attempt of Cubase to correct the intrinsic Latency ot the VST Chain itself. In Detail:
When you play a midi note to a VST instrument it takes a while until the Sound is present on your Output. This is the combined Latency of the instrument itself and the VST processing chain (Effects etc).
When the Note is played from a MIDI Track cubase compensates for this automatically and plays the note by exact this amount early. So you never get aware of this Issue.
Now when you deliver a note from a Keyboard cubase doesn't recalculates this displacement correctly and places the Note wrong. So the placement is correct but cubase is somewehere else in the Future
I've tried to correct this with a Logical Editor script to move all notes by 55 ms to the right but unfortunatly my cubase doesn't processes the fractals of seconds correctly :-(
So this seems useless for me. Maybe your cubase version is smarter.
Alternatively you can move the play offset by a couple of miliseconds but this doesn't helps in my case as i need Quantising to correct my (Guitar Players) Keyboard arts. But keep in mind, this amount is changing when you add effects etc.
I will continue to search for a solution and keep you informed. Keep tuned