Guys, a little sense-check her please. Is what I’m trying to do even possible? If not I don’t need to waste anymore time banging my head against the wall 
I have a studio away from home with the usual big speakers, amps, audio interfaces, cables everywhere etc. But I’m wanting to make a ‘lite’ version at home where I can work on basic projects at my general household computer (iMac). I’m wanting to keep this as streamlined and as minimal as possible. My home must not turn into another messy studio space. As such I have utilised an old interface (UR22) and a synth/controller (Nord Lead 2).
I’m dead set on having the audio come from the iMac speakers. I know you’ll be wondering why on earth I’d do that. But for a start, it’s familiar. That’s generally how I listen to music at home. Two, there’s a very definite level/volume ceiling. I live in a apartment and it means I can’t get carried away with volume which I could if I added an amplifier and/or monitors. And three, it’s just neat and tidy. I have the studio for volume/accurate (ish) referencing. I just want a little tidy area on my desk where I can do basic housekeeping tasks in Cubase and play my synth without loads of cables and speakers etc.
So outside of Cubase I can get my synth working through the iMac by having created an aggregate device, then having Wavelab open but minimised with the record dialog open and audio monitoring selected. This works great. I can play my synth whilst listening to music from my drive or watching YouTube etc.
Trouble is, this doesn’t really work in Cubase. Using the aggregate device garbles the audio. I can receive MIDI from the synth so I can use it as a controller at least. But I’m struggling to get audio in from it.
Is this even possible somehow? To have the iMac ‘Built-in-Audio’ selected as the main audio driver in Cubase’ Studio Setup whilst somehow monitoring the audio in from the synth to the UR22? I can’t change the driver to UR22 because that means audio is routed to the outputs of the UR22 which are not connected to anything…
Why is it not possible to have separate audio devices for input/output?
My attempts at keeping things simple are being seriously frustrated!
Thank you.