Hi Brad and thanks for replying.

I was going to say… “I’m not using any other plugins at all in any of these testing processes” and, yes, low latency monitoring is enabled even though I don’t believe it should be needed with just one plug in but I’ve been sort of trying everything and this didn’t see to hurt.

But when I popped into my empty song template just now to consider your questions, I found I did have a bunch of effects like reverb, compression and EQ as well as EZKeys available and active on empty tracks. I’ve disabled them all now and it seems like it may have reduced the frequency of occurrences a small bit, they continue to persist

Keep in mind, since the issue is repeatable in the stand alone application, I’ve sort of shifted my attention to EZD2 itself as opposed to S1 as I’m assuming S1 settings are irrelevant to how the stand alone behaves and issue appears identical across USB and MIDI triggered instances.

That said, here are some more S1 settings I’ve applied:

Dropout Protection: Max / Process Block Size 2048 samples / Process Precision 64Bit / Use Native vs Hardware is greyed out and unavailable

Monitoring latencies for instruments are as follows: Standard – 69ms/6632 samples    Low latency 3.21ms / 308 samples

Buffering at 64 appears to produce optimal latency/quality result aside from described issue

Windows Task Manager monitoring shows CPU usage maxing out about 27% during heavy use while S1 tells a different story…

CPU usage indicator hovering around 50% with random spikes to 100% during zero use of EZD2 while heavy use takes it right up to 100% / red indicator on

Please feel free to ask anything else that might help nail things down. Thanks again

Hey Brad, thanks for hanging in here with me!!

FYI, for now at least, I’ve kind of given up on the stand alone app as it falls apart at 128 and only sounds good at 256 which creates far too much latency to be useful. All testing moving forward will be within S1 unless otherwise specified.

When you play quickly, what does the CPU for EZD show? – 22 – 25 before playing then up to a peak of about 38 at maximum input when distortions begin to apear

… try drumming really fast using the EZKeys plug-in and see if the same issue happens? About 30 before playing then up as high as 41 during max input but, interestingly, no distortion of sound whatsoever

If you set the buffer/block size to 128, does the problem go away completely?  Within S1, 128 still seems to be low enough latency to be playable but, yes, at maximum playing speed, some distortion continues to appear. Switched to 256 and WOW!!! All distortion events seem to have vanished and still no latency!!

Does it make a difference as to which EZD EZX/Kit/preset you have loaded? Yes, it did seem as though the more complex kits resulted in more distortion than the basic ones

In the Universal Control interface, is the block size 64 as well? The block size in Universal Control matches up with whatever I set within S1 options. They seem to link automatically. Not sure if that answers your question.

I believe there are 2 things I was doing ‘wrong’ before that this process has helped me discover and resolve. One was toggling the low latency monitoring within S1 which was previously not toggled a few days back. The other is this one just now. That being that I never imagined 256 would provide low enough latency to be playable so didn’t bother trying after toggling low latency monitoring.

So, BAM! The DAW plug-in side of things is solved! I suppose I can live without the stand alone app but would like to resolve that too if possible.

Either way, thank you so very much for helping me reach this place. Very excited about my set up now as it is incredibly fun to play these great sounding kits with my TD-17!!