I've been looking at $1000+ pcie cards all night....just thinking....this is literally, just taking my AES signal and and spitting it back out.

I'm 100% gonna try this, and if it works....you're my hero.  Spent all week recording on my $130 focusrite scarlet, with my ADI-2 pro powered off.  Fingers crossed.....you will literally be my hero.

I think this is the first time my DT1990-pros will be using all 4 connectors, lol.

Edit...actually, idk why, but I could've sworn these were balanced headphones.....any ways, I've been putting off buying either a set of AKG or Sennheiser reference grade open back headphones for the last 2 months.  Guess I have a new criteria to add to the must have list.

Pointless gripe(just venting):  The Adi-2's neither having totalmixfx nor being particularly performant using ASIO over usb has really caused recording vocals to be a major pain point for me.  Anything less than 1024 samples at 192k has major clipping in ableton.  My scarlet can go down to 256 samples at 192k easy.  I did not expect that.  Otherwise, of course, this unit is absolutely spectacular in every way.

I have an RME HDSPe AES for sale if you need it, I would undercut the Reverb prices, send me a PM if interested.

So the fresh install of windows 10 with only ableton and minimum drivers has drastically improved the situation.  I recorded a vocal track last night at 512 samples 192khz, with about 20 active audio/midi tracks with effects running, and the popping/clicking was extremely faint and not present in the export.

I am going to stem out the song and try at 256 today, and will let you know how this goes.   At  512, the latency is manageable for sure.  256 would be more than sufficient.  This is quite surprising to me.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this is more likely due to windows 11 not being ideal for ableton or madiface driver, or is it possible other usb related drivers or installed services running in the back ground are the culprit for the performance difference?

Yes to disabling usb energy savings and highest power profile available in windows.

Disabling C states in bios is interesting.  I hadn't seen that one yet.  I will try that as well now.

I always connect this unit to an empty usb controller and have tried the usb2, usb3(chipset), and usb3(direct cpu) controllers.

I hadn't heard of DPC Latency before, but I found an article on sweetwater just now:
https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ar … -fix-them/

My hardware drivers stay up to date, and there were not any IRQ conflicts.  I've built systems that have had crashes before because of them, and have learned to check system information in windows after building.

I also run DISM and SFC as one of my first troubleshooting methods.

There are some other items in the article, mostly related to networking issues that I have not done before.

I suspect something else is at play here.  It could be windows 11 or it could be other drivers and services.
I had software installed for my keyboard, mouse, and small keyboard used for gaming, as well as steam and several games installed.  Also Discord could have been an issue here.  I never had it running in the background when recording, but I don't fully understand the complexities of the windows registry.

The difference after the fresh install is remarkable.  I've had this unit for at least 6 months, if not more and operation has always been as described before.  Now it's ASIO performance in ableton is outstanding.

I do daily vocal practices listening to qobuz playing over wasapi exclusive mode,  while recording in ableton to critique myself.   I've done this for a long time and always had tolerable clicks at 512 buffer 192K.

Today I was able to run at 128 buffer 192Khz with roughly the same amount of clicking and possibly less.

I also worked on a song after exporting 3 stem tracks, and recorded with effects at 128 buffer 96KHz, with no problem whatsoever.

I'm not sure what the real issue here was, but I did actually order an HDSPe RayDat earlier.  Having TotalMix FX to control monitor levels as well as on DSP routing will be a nice benefit, even with the adi-2 performing at this level.  I probly wouldn't have bought it, had this worked this well all along, but I think it's a worth while addition none the less.

TotalMixFX zero latency monitoring is as advertised.  After the fresh instal the adi-2's usb a little more, it definitely was better, but it just can't compare to DSP monitoring.

DAW monitoring in windows is something that I think is not possible with the kind of latencies many musicians/vocalist would feel perfectly comfortable working in.  Maybe I change my mind about that after working with the raydat more, but DSP monitoring is so much better than I thought it would be.  It matches onboard hardware monitoring as far as I'm concerned.  Not distinguishable difference, and you can control all levels.  Now I have to learn how to use totalmix.  I had some minor trouble routing audio, but was able to figure out basics in less than an hour.

For reference on my latest attempts at DAW monitoring via adi-2 madiface asio:

I'm running on an MSI x570s ace max, generally I prefer ASUS,  but this board had a ton of configurations available as well as overkill VRM/Mosfets.

I literally didn't have anything on my windows install except chipset, ethernet, nvidia, madiface drivers, with ableton being the only software.  All downloaded from the manufacturer that day.  I updated bios about a week ago, and about 3 months before that.

I disabled internal sound card and wifi/bluetooth in the bios.  Disabled global C-states, even set a higher priority to abletons processes and disabled all features except for dot net, smb 1.0, remote deferential compression api support, powershell, and windows media player.