as long as you're "acquiring" cubase legit you shouldn't have much trouble getting the latency down because you'll have the "Getting Into the Details" manual on disk to help you along...in short, open cubase, pull down the options menu and select "System..." from the Audio Setup submenu...this brings up the Audio System Setup dialog screen...here you will pull down the ASIO Device pop-up menu to show a list of available ASIO drivers...a dedicated ASIO driver for your SB card should be listed and you could select it, but make sure you take the time to download and install the latest greatest one for your SB card...however, if you have MS DirectX 8 or 9 already on your system, you may want to select the ASIO DirectX Full Duplex driver (assuming your SB card is Full Duplex capable and has drivers that support DirectX)...if the SB doesn't support DirectX you'll get an error message--in this case, go ahead and select the ASIO driver dedicated for your SB...once you made your selection a latency value in milliseconds will be listed...if this value is less than approximately 35ms your latency problems will be quite nominal if you are able to notice it at all...if you plan on monitoring through cubase you'll need to get the latency down to about 23ms for it not to be distracting...actually, I believe most human ears cannot even detect values around 23ms or less...if, however, you plan to monitor externally through your Fostex you won't have to worry about latency because cubase will compensate for the latency regardless...my advice would be for you to take advantage of your system's "FireWire" bus architecture by going out and buying a MOTU unit that will enable you to bypass your crappy SB and record digitally straight to disk...my MOTU 828 allows me to record up to 8 stereo pairs with excellent anolog to digital conversion...a fast pentium and a bit of tweaking under the Audio System Setup (Audio Performance)--"Memory per Channel" and "Disk Block Buffer Size" has cut my latency to as low as 7ms...I'm not very familiar with the Delta 1010, but I'll bet it doesn't allow up to 8 balanced stereo pairs to be recorded at once...a MOTU unit will also allow you to easily use your Fostex (and any of your favorite analog recordings) as a front end without using any of your "system" resources, and it won't be necessary to "sync" (master or slave) your Fostex to anything, although you could--if your Fostex has that capability...
one last thing--if you don't acquire cubase legit you won't have the "dongle"--which means you won't get very far.
