I asked this same question about my Audigy interface and Cubase SX. 50 people read it and no one answered in a week so I took it off. I also took it upon myself to figure it out. I think I just did, too. With many of these type of interfaces you have a software mixer to control the inputs that eventually go through the PCI card. Long story short, all I had to do was double-click the volume control icon and mute all of the inputs there. This made it so that I could only hear all the instruments I have running into the computer when Cubase was open and those inputs were selected...yata yata.

The KEY is to turn on that little orange (SX 1) monitoring button located on each audio track(the little speaker). I never used this up until a month or so due to misreading the Cubase manual years ago. But how great is it to plug in a guitar, set up a cabinet emulation insert with a envelope-triggered filtered delay and jam away! If this doesn't work (as with my friend and his MOTU 896HD) try deselecting or selecting "ASIO Direct Monitoring" or "Release Asio Driver in the Background" under "VST Multirack Setup." These settings have to due with decreasing latency by routing the inputs straight to the outputs, and thus, might hold your answer.

That all I got, hope it helps!

thanks for the suggestions Schizojames. I'll give it a try

M-

I just figured out that my EMU 1212M Patchmix software has inserts that I can use to add effects after the signal returns from Cubase. SWEET!! this give me the ability to use the hardware effects that are built into the 1212M with 0 latency.

thanks again!

M-

i dunno if this works, cuz i've never tried to direct monitor fx, but here goes.
try to make a new fx channel and put watever fx you want there and turn it on.
on the channel inspector, set it up so the outs are the fx channel.

hey mcmilliron, to expand upon what schizo said...

you will want to enable ASIO direct monitoring in your devices setup. that is necessary for the cubase audio engine to play back your samples in real time. however, this is subject to a small amount of latency. try tweaking latency buffer settings and mixing the emu routed signal with the cubase-monitored signal. initially you probably hear a slap back echo effect, which is the emu routed signal followed by the cubase-monitored signal. as you decrease your buffers, this echo should minimize mostly. honestly how low you can go depends on your system.

you shouldn't need to check the "release ASIO driver in background" unless you're using multiple ASIO programs. even then, your soundcard would have to support multiple ASIO apps at once.

hope this helps some,
-eric.

I got it to work through my Cubase software but I couldn't get rid of the slap back echo effect it was causing. I tried lowering the ASIO latency but it didn't help. Thank god my 1212M has hardware effects that don't use any CPU.

Thanks again for all your suggestions.

Mark,