a while back I remember reading a post by GG about Premiere having realtime external video AND audio monitoring and Vegas Video not having it...I'm using a Maxtor 1394 card with the Sony DVMCDA2 media converter...now, when I set up external monitoring in Vegas, I only get video coming out of the media converter...no audio...BUT I came up with a solution that might help...I just plugged the output of my soundcard to the audio input on the TV set that I was using to monitor...so the video came from the 1394 card-->media converter-->TV video in...audio came from the PC soundcard-->TV audio in...realtime external video and audio monitoring...