Overall, this is a great system. Using plugins while tracking has become a game changer. I don't have much outboard gear so I largely mix with plugins. Tracking with them has never been an option until now. Something I never considered before is how nice it is to hear compression while tracking! Using the StudioRack plugin, I throw a CLA-2A, a C4 and a TrueVerb on a vocalist and they love it. Also gone are the patching gymnastics I had to do when punching in to avoid latency. Now it's just hit record and the StudioRack plugin instantly changes its flow to accommodate no audible latency to the artist. If you're like me and want the tracking latency PT HD offers but the PT price tag has been just too much to swallow, this is a great way to go. The ASIO drivers are solid, no issues with the DAWs I've tried.

Some specifics about my setup:
I have had the IOC for about one month at the time of this review. I am running this on Windows 7 with an Intel i7 OC'ed to 4.5 GHz and 32GB RAM. Recording drives are two WD Blacks in RAID 0. I opted for the IOC because I already had a Focusrite Saffire Liquid 56 which I wanted to use as my preamp front end. In order to do low latency monitoring I was required to also purchase a DSP server so I went with a demo model of the Waves Impact Server. Even though the Saffire introduces additional latency, neither I nor anyone I have recorded have been able to detect any while monitoring.

A few things to be aware of:

1. Consider putting this on its own physical LAN. Capturing a few moments of network traffic with Wireshark yielded around 11,000 packets per second between the computer, the IOC and the DSP server when the system was set to 44.1kHz. Up that to 96 kHz and it's more like 18,0000 packets per second. This high utilization is present even when no DAW is running. My studio PC runs on a standard gigabit network which it shares with numerous other systems but due to the high amount of network traffic Soundgrid uses I opted to install a network card just for it (see point 2.) Even though a proper switch will direct the Soundgrid traffic only to the ports where the DigiGrid devices are connected without affecting other network-connected devices, my experience is that the IOC still sends out around numerous broadcast packets each second which will be seen by all devices on the subnet.

2. I haven't tried this on a Mac but on a PC the network interface card (NIC) you use for the DigiGrid network seems to matter. I first tried a Realtek PCI NIC. During my testing with this configuration I found that high track count projects were somewhat unstable: Pops and dropouts occurred frequently, even without any plugins loaded into the StudioRack insert. This was especially true when the eMotion mixer window was visible where I experienced high CPU usage spikes.(I experienced no such spikes when the Patch and Setup windows were selected on the same application or the mixer window was closed.) I decided to try a different NIC so I used a StarTech USB3-to-gigabit dongle. The pops and clicks were diminished but still present so I knew I was onto something. I finally found success when I tried a PCIe Intel Desktop CT NIC: No more artifacts and rock-solid performance!

3. The SG Studio application runs all the time, even with the application window closed. While running it uses around 500MB of memory, even with no DAW running. This application must be running for StudioRack to talk to Soundgrid.

4. To use plugins on StudioRack you will need to shell out a bit more cash for a Waves Update Plan if yours isn't currently up-to-date. After that, run Easy Activate and Install in the Waves Central install program and you should be off and running.

5. The system is immensely powerful but there was a learning curve for me.The workflow was not intuitive at first. I feel fairly comfortable with it now but it took some practice, experimenting and (re-)reading the SG Studio and StudioRack manuals.

These are minor considerations, though, and I still consider this a wonderful system. Once I got the NIC thing dialed in it became perfectly stable. Plus, at the end of the day the sound is the most important factor to me and to me it sounds nothing short of fantastic. 5 stars.

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