From time to time the audio and playback keeps breaking intermitenly
When you say “breaking” i assume you mean drop outs (interruptions in the audio)?
The FA-66 is a firewire (ieee 1394) audio device capable of low latencies using ASIO drivers. By the sounds of things either your latency is set to low for your computer hardware or you still have running processes in there somewhere that are affecting its performance.
To be honest with you, it doesn’t really matter how good the spec of your computer is... if the firewire host controller on your laptop isn’t very good then it will affect the performance of the FA-66. Ieee 1394 host controllers are also network adaptors so shutting down all the network processes on your laptop is a good idea. Also a thing to remember, when running at low latencies the firewire host controller can be very taxing on your CPU.
I have to say that when using the laptop's sound card, there is not breaking.
Are you using an ASIO driver with your internal soundcard?
The standard WDM driver for soundcards have very hi latencies, there is alot of time for audio correction and buffering with these drivers, so any drop outs won’t be noticed unless there is something massively wrong.
Regards,
Bryan
