Mackie Onyx Blackjack Latency

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Mackie Onyx Blackjack Mackie's Onyx mic pres have garnered a good reputation among recordists, but it's not everybody that needs or wants to have a full-blown mixer in their recording setup, not to mention any affordability issues. The Blackjack also has an input monitor with zero latency allowing the dry signal to be conveniently previewed. This signal can then be sent to the headphone or 1/4' monitor jacks. Be sure to not mistakenly monitor both your DAW and the dry signal simultaneously-you might hear some phasing. The Mackie Onyx Blackjack is a very small interface that is a 2 in and 2 out USB unit. The latency is suppose to be zero but I could hear a very small amount of latency while listening to play back and it was really irritating me. This unit is very inexpensive costing around 150 dollars, if you are a musician that has used some good interfaces. The Mackie Onyx Blackjack is a combined USB audio interface and monitor-level controller aimed at those who only need to record one or two inputs at a time, but who want the preamp and digital conversion quality of Mackie's larger Onyx interfaces and mixers.

Mackie Onyx Blackjack Latency Checker

Mackie onyx blackjack latency 3.0

Mackie Onyx Blackjack Latency 3.0

Onyx

Mackie Onyx Blackjack Latency Test

OK, so I got this Mackie mixer and once I got the drivers set up and what not, I tried to record some music. I tried to record one mono track of guitar using the 'Hi-z' function on channel one. When I recorded this, it was distorted and sounded awful. I tried increasing the buffer size to as high as it would go, and while this made the problem less severe, i could still hear the distortion (if you need to hear what the distortion sounds like I can upload an mp3). This caused me to install Tracktion, the software that comes with the mixer, just to see if it made a difference, and sure enough, it did. Recording through the mixer with Tracktion works great. Now, I am reasonably happy with Tracktion, but I know Sonor is so much more powerful, and I know I will want to use it some time soon. So this is my question: Why does Sonor distort my audio while Tracktion doesn't?