Asio is a lower latency driverset that allows you to record audio while hearing playback without a high latency issue. It's a driverset standard designed by Steinberg, now owned by Pinnacle, that most audio cards utilize. We are now seeing the implementation of ASIO 2.0
ASIO means Audio Stream In/Out, and by using ASIO, you gain some power by using the audio card's tools rather than depending on the processor to do all the work. For playback only, you aren't missing anything. With ASIO, you can usually get latency down to less than 10ms. They aren't as good a driverset as WDM, but Microsoft isn't doing a lot with WDM these days, and Vegas has never supported the WDM platform anyway. I wish it did.
I'm sure this is cool, but I recorded a mini-album with some friends a couple years back using Vegas 2.0. It worked fine, and we had 20+ tracks per song. We listened to all the recorded tracks while recording a new one, with no noticable latency. Is ASIO really that big an improvement?
By the way, a couple months ago I tried to perform the same process with Vegas 4.0 and there was horrible latency, upwards of a second or so. Any idea what would have caused that? I was just messing around, so I didn't try hard to fix it. Just using the sound chip on the motherboard, nothing special. Perhaps that's it?
I just had a look at the M-Audio site, I see it does look like your box doesn't support ASIO, probably as it's USB, the Firewire 410 does having more bandwidth to play with. Down side to the 410 is less I/O but it looks great for my needs and its a little cheaper.
I was just looking for something that would turn a laptop into a mobile reorder. I had been looking at a DAT recorder but this is cheaper and much more flexible.
I have an Echo Mia sound card. I find that when I use the ASIO drivers, I lose audio/video sync when previewing from the timeline. Rendered files or print to tape seem to work O.K.
I do not have this problem with the Classic Windows Driver.
If I'm recording analog audio, I switch back to the ASIO drivers on the (perhaps mistaken) assumption that it gives you somewhat better recording performance.