Reply to Sound Drops Out For A Split Second

I am running Traktor Pro on my Hewlett Packard laptop running Windows 7 x64 Professional with a Vestax VCI 100 & the Native Instruments audio 8. I am coming out of channel A on the Audio 8 and into my amp The laptop has a 3 gig processor and 4 gig of ram.

So I am practising my Techno set and recording it within Traktor and on 3 separate occasions now I have experienced the sound dying for a split second and then coming back on.

Is this a latency problem? I have the preferences set to fast cpu and it has still done it. It did it when it was set to slow also.