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There is always random clicks in my headphones (from the 8pre phone jack), even when I'm not recording (or armed), or during playback. It is always 3 short clicks/buzzes, always panned L-R-L or R-L-R, in quick succession. Arming and recording produces distortion/noise whenever the microphone picks up any decent amount of sound (bottom of dBFS meter). If I record sound, and play back the file (in Ableton Live), it will produce distortion/noise, again with any small amount of recorded sound.
Right now, I tried to record again, and I don't hear any sound out of the headphones, or during playback of the recorded sound file.

I have been checking my latency using this http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I get a latency spike every 15 seconds, +/- 2 seconds. I've disabled a bunch of devices to see if it would help the situation, but nothing seemed to affect it.
The clock on the 8pre does correspond to my sample rate (48 kHz), yet goes down to 44.1 every 61 seconds and blinks for about 6 seconds before returning to the 48 kHz setting.

I am using a Sony Vaio F-series laptop, which has a 4-pin firewire port. I used to have an HP laptop with XP installed, and it worked a lot better, although after a while I would just get noise output and have to restart the 8pre. This is driving me crazy, and I would like to not go back to XP just for this to somewhat work. I opened a techlink, but no one has gotten back to me yet. Hopefully soon. If anyone could help me figure this out, i'd really appreciate it! Otherwise I'm thinking of returning this and getting something else that historically has a better relationship with Windows.

Make sure the clock is set correctly. Typically the interface uses the internal clock and all other devices slave from the 8pre. I have seen clicks and pops occur with mismatch clock settings especially with higher audio levels (above -6dB).

Coming to this a little late but...

Based on what you're seeing from the Latency Checker, I wonder whether you're running Win 7? I have an 8-Pre, Win 7 32 bit and, although I haven't experienced anything like the level of problem you're seeing I have seen those latency spikes shown by Latency Checker. I too tried disabling virtually everything on my system, to no avail. Eventually, on another forum someone pointed to the free LatencyMonitor from http://www.resplendence.com. It monitors your computer and gives a report on what, exactly, is causing the latency spikes; in my case it turned out to be a core Windows file ntkrnlpla.exe! No way can that be disabled!

Anyway to come back to your problem more specifically, I found the only way I could use the 8-Pre as an input/output with either REAPER or Adobe Audition was to increase the buffer to its maximum setting (2048, I think). This did not give any problems for monitoring of overdubs since CueMix gives zero latency.

Have to admit I haven't seen the issue of the clock apparently altering its sample rate, albeit for very short periods.

HTH.

Jeff

PS. Forum software does not seem to like the name of the other DAW software I mentioned, R E A P E R.

Ah, sorry for taking so long to reply. I thought I would be getting an e-mail notification..

kbgkgould, do you mean if my DAW has the same clock as my interface? I always match them. No problem there.

I was looking through the Presonus forums and there's a great sticky in the pre-sales section for choosing the right computer. But a lot of the info applies to all audio interfaces. I found that Resplendence monitor in there (thanks anyways, Jeff).

I ran it and I have several problems, which include the battery and network adapter (I disabled them in Device Manager). This did help to improve my latency, but I'm still getting spikes, from different DPC routines such as ACPI.sys, 1394 OpenHCI Port Driver, TCP/IP Driver, Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver, Directx Graphics Kernel, NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, and an NDIS 6.20 Driver (they all seem to be fighting for top latency position, keeps changing). At one point, the Intel Rapid Storage driver took 6 ms to execute, and just now the 1394 OHCI driver took 17 ms. And the MOTU firewire driver spiked as well (8 ms to execute, I think when I was doing a recording test just now).

I also looked at the IRQ's, to see if my firewire port was shared with anything else. It's shared with an Intel 6 Series Chipset Family PCI express root port 1C14. I don't know if this is good or not?

During my test recording I just did, I still can't get any sound, recording or playback, even though waveforms do show up in Ableton Live. Jeff, I just tried changing the buffer setting to 1024 samples (highest available), but nothing changed.

Can anyone make sense of this information? I have screenshots too, but I don't see how I can attach them here.

Edit: Yes, Jeff, I'm using Windows 7, but 64-bit. Sorry I didn't mention that. Also my chipset is a Ricoh one. I heard that's bad, but I had no idea before buying my laptop that the different brands could have such a huge difference.