Thanks Mac, your counsel on the hardware is greatly appreciated. I am still learning how to tweak these types of parameters and how moving them win on one side while losing on another.

If I understand you correctly, the MME drivers are located on the Window OS? Presently, I am using a Saffire firewire interface and the selection in RB appears as: "Saffire ASIO." Is there a way to look for MME in order to use that instead? Up until now I have not had any issues with latency. However, if I find myself tweaking to fix the crackling noise to the point where I will then hear noticable latency I want to plan another option.