Hi all.
I have downloaded and am testing Cubase Elements 6, I like what I see so far and will probably end up buying the full Cubase 6 version.
Please bear with my longish description, want to make it as clear as possible.
I have one weird thing that I cant fathom out, I realise this isn’t a problem with Cubase it’s self, more my setup, just wondered if any of you guys had any ideas please.
Running win7 64 bit, 6GB RAM, 60GB SSD as main drive, 2TB other internal drives, dual monitor, Geforce GTX 465 GC, Asus DX2 sound card.
I simply have a small Peavey PV8 USB mixing desk with the L&R outputs going to active speakers.
Into that I have my Korg M3 and my PC’s Asus DX2 sound card.
My Korg M3 also has individual outs and two of these are connected to the line input of my PC’s sound card so that if I want to record the audio from my korg, I simply tell the Korg to use outputs 1 and 2 instead of the default outputs which means it goes straight into my PC rather than to my mixing desk.
So I install Cubase Elements 6 64bit and work through the manual. I try playing around with one of the s/w synths, I select Prologue. I initially have no sound, then I work out I need to select an ASIO driver.
I select “ASIO DirectX Full Duplex Driver” but I have a little lag when using my Korg to play via midi.
So I try “ASIO4ALL v2” and this works perfectly.
But I notice there’s an ASIO driver made by my soundcard, “Xonar D2X ASIO(64)” so thought I’d give this a try. This also works with zero lag, BUT the synth sounds completely different.
My initial thought was that there was some sort of effect etc set up on the sound cards software, but I have everything set off.
I tried on the other s/w synth the HALion Sonic SE, and on the Grove Agent ONE, again the Asus ASIO driver sounds completely different to the others.
Perplexed, I thought I’d do some more investigation and this is where things get really weird 
I got my Korg M3 playing a loop, set the output to the PC line in and recorded a few bars as audio.
I then set my Korg back to the mixing desk outputs so I could here both side by side.
I simply turned the PC down on the mixing desk and the korg up, then did the opposite to hear how the sound change
Playing back the audio track with the Asus driver sounded exactly the same as the korg M3 does.
Playing back the same audio track with any of the other ASIO drivers and the sound changes.
So it looks like problem solved, simply use the ASIO driver supplied with my sound card driver.
However
I wanted to try and record the differences to show you.
First I selected the Asus ASIO driver, then exported to a wave file. Then I selected the ASIO4ALL driver and did the same thing.
Both of these wave files play back with both VLC and windows media centre, sounding EXACTLY the same. What’s more, they both sound EXACTLY the same as all my tries earlier when I used the non Asus driver, in other words, if I play back either wave file and compare it to my actual synth, it sounds different.
If your still with me, well done.
Basically to recap,
Asus ASIO driver sounds same as Hardware Synth, the other ASIO drivers don’t (but all others sound the same)
Mixing down audio track using ASUS driver to a wave file ends up with a wave file sounding like the non Asus driver.
It’s got me confused. Later, I’ll find something to record from my mixing desk so that you can here the difference, it’s quite substantial.
Any ideas?
thanks
Joe