Instruction Manual

257
Input Monitoring
Recording
button that turn’s that track’s input monitoring on or off.
• Global Input Monitor button—the Playback State toolbar (to display, use
the Views-Toolbars-Playback State command) has the Input Monitor
button on the right end, which turns input monitoring on or off on all
audio tracks with one click.
• Audio Engine button —clicking this button so that it’s in its up
position turns all audio activity in SONAR off, which includes input
monitoring.
Note: When you use input monitoring, make sure that the track you’re
playing through uses the same audio interface (sound card) for both input
and output. Using different audio interfaces for a track’s input and output
can produce distortion during input monitoring.
To understand the echo and feedback problems, let’s look at how audio
signals travel through your sound card, the drivers, and SONAR. The
following diagram depicts a simplified version of this signal flow.
The bottom block of the picture represents the sound card. The shaded
area above it represents the audio drivers. The unshaded area at the top
represents the main environment of the operating system.
As the diagram shows, analog audio flows into the card's line input (on the
left), and is immediately split in two. One branch goes up through the
analog-to-digital converter (ADC), where the audio is digitized, buffered and
fed to the driver (labeled Wave In in the diagram).