External Audio being recorded EARLY? (makes no sense)

Question

When recording an external drum machine that is midi sync'd to Logic 8's clock, the audio that gets recorded to disk ends up hitting 'early'... In other words, the attack portion of the Kick drum is always recorded AHEAD of the 'down beat' marker in Logic.
This makes it tedious to later go and bounce specific loop regions for exporting into other applications, such as Ableton Live.
WHat I can't figure out is how to universally correct this. I want ALL my external audio tracks to come in at the same time, but not so early. I don't understand why or how audio would 'arrive' at the hard disk AHEAD of the clock that Logic is supposedly spitting out to the same beat as its audio region markers...that shouldn't even be possible! (If anything, the audio should be coming in 'late' due to midi latency).
Can anyone help? Both my studio partner and I are flustered. This doesn't happen when recording directly into Ableton live for example...

Answer 1

I have had this exact problem a number of times, and it renders Logic somewhat useless to me as I record drum parts through external midi devices, and I need them to be recorded in sync.
I had a MOTU 828MkII, and an AMT8, so I tried other midi and audio interfaces to figure out what the problem was. I could not believe that the delay was a negative delay - and I eventually set the interface delay to a really high number to try and see what that did. Well that did provide a really high delay, and then when I set it back to zero - no problem! It was very strange, as if the parameter was stuck, but showing zero previously. I know when I first installed Logic, it set a delay into this automatically, and I think that's what the problem was. In any case, changing the delay up and down, and then back to zero seemed to fix my problem.
Then eventually months later, the problem came up again. However now I was using an NRV10 Firewire mixer as my audio interface, and a little MOTU Fastlane USB for midi. It's clearly not the interfaces I'm using, it's Logic.
I don't use the plug-in delay compensation, because as I understand it, you will have midi sent out early if you do, and I already have that problem. However it's as if you always have some kind of strange compensation going on. At one point I set the interface buffer to 1024, and guess what, the audio was early by 1024 samples. Then I set it to 512, and then it was 512 early. After messing around with these parameters trying to get it right, it then became more inconsistent, and I could not predict the results. . For example adding 50ms of delay made the midi signal occur earlier! Then I added another 10ms to that, and it was later - go figure.
In any case, this is a serious problem. I'm just trying to record external devices in sync, and it won't do it. Makes all the great features of Logic totally useless.
I have not seen any clear solution posted anywhere, I'm not sure why some people have the problem and other do not. It's not just a bad firewire driver.
Scottt.