Just bought a Presonus Firepod recording interface bundled with Cubase LE4. Using a Dell laptop Windows XP Professional with a recently purchased firewire "expresscard." The laptop notices the new card and the drivers are installed properly.

Set everything up and tried a test recording with headphones plugged into the firepod hardware and everything sounded fine. Recorded myself talking into Cubase, played it back, and the sound was severely distorted. I could hear myself "talking" (more like making noise) but it was unintelligible and there was a heavy distortion. Even when I exported the audio to a wav file the sound was distorted.

Microphone I used is in top condition -- brand new sm57.

I have altered the latency (under "devices -- device setup -- ASIO DirectX Full Duplex Driver -- Control Panel") in both directions as per other post suggestions and they seem to have no effect. The driver under "devices -- device setup" is set up verbatim as instructed by the documentation that came with the firepod.

Please help!