Issues with my audio interface/sound card

[baxter300]

Pretty new to all this home recording, but in need of some help.

Been wanting to do home recording for a couple of years now, started off with my first purchase Line 6 UX2 audio interface and soon found out that my 6 year old family PC was sorely out classed by it.

I upgraded my PC found the parts I wanted and basically started from scratch now I've got a 3.1 quad core AMD processor and 8 gig of memory. As for hardware I'm using the on board graphics from my motherboard (as I'm not too fussed about graphics) and I'm using the Line 6 UX2 as my sound card.

Now the issue I'm having is with latency and under running, I've been using Nuendo and after a bit of research started to learn about buffers and latency etc. So to get the least latency I've had to turn the buffer down quite a lot on my UX2, latency wise I couldn't be happier but having this small buffer is causing sound issues during play back or when just listening to music.

I've found a way around this (temporarily) and that's to manually change the buffer size depending on what I'm doing (ie low for recording, higher for playback). My question is how is this resolved in more professional situations? I thought maybe its possible that the best solution would be to purchase another piece of hardware, such as an external sound card, then I'd have 2 buffers to play with, what do you guys think?

PS. I do have an on board sound card with my motherboard but tbh I don't think that using this would do justice to the 8" monitors I spent a small fortune on

 

[mjbphotos]

The solution for latency is direct monitoring - listening to the recorded tracks from the computer along with the incoming signal to the interface (not this signal directed to the computer and back to the interface).

 

[baxter300]

Maybe I didn't explain it right, the problem with the latency isn't in the monitoring, it comes with the recording. I'm trying to record guitars straight into Nuendo, so when I suffer from latency issues, the recorded guitar parts are out of sync with the project. I can eliminate this latency by reducing the buffer size, but the Line 6 UX2 is also my sound card as well as my interface. This means that while I can make the latency almost unnoticeable, the small buffer size causes issues when I try to play back the project, if that makes sense

 

[tim@harrison]

Are you running a ton of plug-ins / effects while recording? That can cause errors in playback with a low buffer size + delay compensation. Some plug-ins can get rather CPU intensive...