Audio interface suggestions needed! (Update: RME interface has arrived!)

Stuckfast

WiresDreamDisasters said:Reaper reporting 64 samples here. And it gets larger the bigger a buffer size for your audio interface you have. I can go through all my plugins if you want, but suffice to say, it's rare for a plugin to *not* add some sort of latency, even if it is only 3samples. It all adds up.

Where in Reaper are you getting this reading from? That sounds crazy to me. Why on earth would the latency of a native plug-in depend on the buffer size?

octatonic

WiresDreamDisasters said:

octatonic said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Stuckfast said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Stuckfast said:

That's right, most native plug-ins don't add latency unless they use lookahead or convolution.

This isn't true I'm afraid. A lot of plugins will add latency. It's just the nature of the beast.

Checkout Black76 by IK Multimedia for example. Every instance adds 64samples of latency.

It is absolutely true. It's also true that a lot of plug-ins do add latency. That's cos there are a huge number of plug-ins in the world.

My Pro Tools system reports Black 76 as having a latency of 3 samples not 64, but an 1176 emulation is a special case. The hardware actually has an attack time that's faster than a single sample at base sample rates, so I guess it's necessary to use lookahead to emulate its behaviour properly.

Reaper reporting 64 samples here. And it gets larger the bigger a buffer size for your audio interface you have. I can go through all my plugins if you want, but suffice to say, it's rare for a plugin to *not* add some sort of latency, even if it is only 3samples. It all adds up.

This was essentially my point- the cumulative latency of lots of plugins creates a scenario that requires hardware monitoring to get around it, or a multiplexing DSP solution like Pro Tools HD.
Or an analogue console.

Yep. It's one of the things that made me get the UA Apollo unit. Now I can monitor through effects when tracking, with no latency (or at least minimal) via the Console application, then in the mix I've still got RAW recordings. Since at FX we have some UA units anyway and a bunch of plugins, it made sense for me to go that route.

The UA Distressor is AMAZING on drums and vocals.

I have a UA interface and it is fine for recording by yourself- easy to shift between tracking and mixing.

I hate it when tracking others, especially bands recording live where you need lots of individual cue mixing.
This is still where HDX rules- just one mixer to work with and it is just easy to work with.

UA Distressor is great- I've compared it against my hardware unit and it is so close you are down to 'component difference' levels of variation. Really, really close.
I love it on room mics.

WiresDreamDisasters

Stuckfast said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:Reaper reporting 64 samples here. And it gets larger the bigger a buffer size for your audio interface you have. I can go through all my plugins if you want, but suffice to say, it's rare for a plugin to *not* add some sort of latency, even if it is only 3samples. It all adds up.

Where in Reaper are you getting this reading from? That sounds crazy to me. Why on earth would the latency of a native plug-in depend on the buffer size?

It's reported in the Performance Meter panel, under the column PDC.

So in an empty project. One instance of Black76 in it. With the soundcard set to 32 samples buffer at 44.1khz, the PDC value as reported in Reaper is 64 samples.

So this seems correct. As long as the plugin itself is reporting it's latency to the host correctly. Which you can't always bank on.

The CLA76 reportedly doesn't require any PDC (the value is 0) because it's not adding any latency to the signal - again, if it's reporting correctly. Likewise with Native Instruments VC76.

Now here's the thing... just because Reaper is reporting that it's applying a 64sample plugin-delay-compensation does not mean the plugin itself actually has that amount of latency. What it means is that Reaper may be working in power of 2 block-sizes, and thus delaying by 32, 64, 128, etc. 

IE: The host makes the decision about how much delay compensation to apply based on the amount of latency that the plugin causes. The plugin doesn't tell the host how much to apply. And this is why it is variable based on your soundcard buffer size. All hosts are going to treat this differently from what I can tell.

It's not true that only lookahead and convolution cause plugins to be latent, which causes hosts to apply PDC. Other factors can often come into play, oversampling being one of them. Oversampling can cause plugins to be latent, thus requiring the host to employ PDC.

Seems to me we're talking slightly at crossed purposes anyway. Because the original discussion point was about low latency or realtime monitoring. Something a plugin can affect, but is ultimately down to the host.

If I've got anything wrong there, feel free to clear it up!

WiresDreamDisasters

octatonic said:

I hate it when tracking others, especially bands recording live where you need lots of individual cue mixing.
This is still where HDX rules- just one mixer to work with and it is just easy to work with.

I actually had a lot of fun using it when tracking drums for the new TNBD album. Cue mixing was epic using Console. Routed click and the master out from Reaper to different busses in Console, and could manage all the signals right from there. Drummer was pretty good about wanting consistent levels anyway, so I barely touched it. But if he needed a bit more click, just had it right next to the backing music coming from Reaper.

Didn't monitor through the DAW at all.

octatonic

You can't trust self reporting in DAW's- it is well known they aren't accurate except in a fuzzy maths kinda way.

Drew is correct regarding oversampling.
Fabfilter and Cytomic's 'The Glue' are two products that have variable oversampling.
Crank up the oversampling and watch the latency climb.

WiresDreamDisasters

octatonic said:

You can't trust self reporting in DAW's- it is well known they aren't accurate except in a fuzzy maths kinda way.

Drew is correct regarding oversampling.
Fabfilter and Cytomic's 'The Glue' are two products that have variable oversampling.
Crank up the oversampling and watch the latency climb.

Easy way to test how much latency a plugin has is to do a ping test, then compare at the sample level.

I love The Glue, tis epic!

octatonic

WiresDreamDisasters said:

octatonic said:

You can't trust self reporting in DAW's- it is well known they aren't accurate except in a fuzzy maths kinda way.

Drew is correct regarding oversampling.
Fabfilter and Cytomic's 'The Glue' are two products that have variable oversampling.
Crank up the oversampling and watch the latency climb.

Easy way to test how much latency a plugin has is to do a ping test, then compare at the sample level.

I love The Glue, tis epic!

Another one really close to the hardware.
The UA version is even closer though.

WiresDreamDisasters

We actually have the comp that FX BusComp was based on in the rack in the studio, and The Glue is a sort of child of FX BusComp because the guy who made The Glue used to work for FX. He's now doing some cool stuff for Ableton and others iirc.

octatonic

WiresDreamDisasters said:

We actually have the comp that FX BusComp was based on in the rack in the studio, and The Glue is a sort of child of FX BusComp because the guy who made The Glue used to work for FX. He's now doing some cool stuff for Ableton and others iirc.

I didn't realise Andy was ex-FX.

WiresDreamDisasters

octatonic said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

We actually have the comp that FX BusComp was based on in the rack in the studio, and The Glue is a sort of child of FX BusComp because the guy who made The Glue used to work for FX. He's now doing some cool stuff for Ableton and others iirc.

I didn't realise Andy was ex-FX.

Yeah, he worked on the comp's, the filters that ended up in Synth Squad, Strobe2, Cypher2, etc.. etc.. I'm sure Angus has done more work on them since, but a good chunk started with Andy. I think he did Orca back in the day too, but that was before my time.

octatonic

WiresDreamDisasters said:

octatonic said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

We actually have the comp that FX BusComp was based on in the rack in the studio, and The Glue is a sort of child of FX BusComp because the guy who made The Glue used to work for FX. He's now doing some cool stuff for Ableton and others iirc.

I didn't realise Andy was ex-FX.

Yeah, he worked on the comp's, the filters that ended up in Synth Squad, Strobe2, Cypher2, etc.. etc.. I'm sure Angus has done more work on them since, but a good chunk started with Andy. I think he did Orca back in the day too, but that was before my time.

I talk to him from time to time as I am on the beta-team for Cytomic, although not for a bit as it seems to be pretty stable.
I'd like to see him doing more products.

WiresDreamDisasters

octatonic said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

octatonic said:

WiresDreamDisasters said:

We actually have the comp that FX BusComp was based on in the rack in the studio, and The Glue is a sort of child of FX BusComp because the guy who made The Glue used to work for FX. He's now doing some cool stuff for Ableton and others iirc.

I didn't realise Andy was ex-FX.

Yeah, he worked on the comp's, the filters that ended up in Synth Squad, Strobe2, Cypher2, etc.. etc.. I'm sure Angus has done more work on them since, but a good chunk started with Andy. I think he did Orca back in the day too, but that was before my time.

I talk to him from time to time as I am on the beta-team for Cytomic, although not for a bit as it seems to be pretty stable.
I'd like to see him doing more products.

Yeah me too. I think he's super busy with contract work, but haven't spoke to him for a while. He was over in London for a bit and came to the FX office for a natter. Nice guy. Super super knows his shit.

Stuckfast

Just fired up Reaper, and you're right, it seems to apply plug-in delay compensation in blocks of samples equal to the buffer size. However if you load in an instance of Black 76 on a track and look in the bottom left corner of the Track FX window you can see that it says "3/1024 spls" or whatever. Which presumably indicates that that instance is using 3 of the available 1024 samples in the PDC block. It also tells you how much CPU it's using, which is a nice touch.

And yes you're absolutely right that it's not only lookahead and convolution that introduce latency, I just used those as examples.

WiresDreamDisasters

Stuckfast said:

Just fired up Reaper, and you're right, it seems to apply plug-in delay compensation in blocks of samples equal to the buffer size. However if you load in an instance of Black 76 on a track and look in the bottom left corner of the Track FX window you can see that it says "3/1024 spls" or whatever. Which presumably indicates that that instance is using 3 of the available 1024 samples in the PDC block. It also tells you how much CPU it's using, which is a nice touch.

And yes you're absolutely right that it's not only lookahead and convolution that introduce latency, I just used those as examples.

Ah cool, I didn't spot that actually. 3 samples for the plugin then, but Reaper just goes "fuck it!" and delays by a whole device block. Kinda .... odd. Wonder if this is common to most daws or not, despite what they report??

octatonic

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Stuckfast said:

Just fired up Reaper, and you're right, it seems to apply plug-in delay compensation in blocks of samples equal to the buffer size. However if you load in an instance of Black 76 on a track and look in the bottom left corner of the Track FX window you can see that it says "3/1024 spls" or whatever. Which presumably indicates that that instance is using 3 of the available 1024 samples in the PDC block. It also tells you how much CPU it's using, which is a nice touch.

And yes you're absolutely right that it's not only lookahead and convolution that introduce latency, I just used those as examples.

Ah cool, I didn't spot that actually. 3 samples for the plugin then, but Reaper just goes "fuck it!" and delays by a whole device block. Kinda .... odd. Wonder if this is common to most daws or not, despite what they report??

The problem is they all use different maths for calculation of latency.

The way I calculate latency in Pro Tools for Hardware Delay Compensation is pretty simple.
I send a kick drum out of two outputs- a loopback and a hardware output.
The amount of displacement between the loopback and the hardware output (in samples) is the delay compensation required.

You can do the same with plugins.
On the whole I just use PDC and get on with my life.

Stuckfast

WiresDreamDisasters said:

3 samples for the plugin then, but Reaper just goes "fuck it!" and delays by a whole device block. Kinda .... odd. Wonder if this is common to most daws or not, despite what they report??

It does seem a bit strange. I wonder if it's necessary in order to ensure there are no glitches when plug-ins are added or removed during playback?

Pro Tools reports the total latency and amount of compensation applied for each track in the mixer. As far as I can tell the amount of compensation is just equal to the longest path through the mixer at any one time, it doesn't seem to be related to powers of 2 or the buffer size.

tekbow

The discussion got a bit beyond me, but I have an ID44 and like it. No apparent latency issues I can hear. I record and the noise comes thru the monitors as I play it.

Freebird

octatonic said:

I don't use regularly Reaper, but all native DAW's use the same system, for processing audio- you have an audio buffer of X samples (lets say 128) plus the time it takes for the audio to convert from analogue to digital and back from digital to analogue.

the buffer sits between the A->D and D->A stages.

When a plugin is instantiated, if it is light enough to be able to process all the audio within the buffer size then no additional latency will be added.
As your project grows in size your buffer will need to grow because there will not be enough processing power to process all the audio inside the buffer time- this is why you get a 'tearing' type sound.

It is why, as you grow the session, from being a 'tracking' methodology (with a low buffer) to a mixing methodology (with a higher buffer). The higher the buffer, the more latency.

Say you are 80% the way through mixing a track and you want to add an overdub.
You will likely have a much larger buffer (say 1024 samples) in order to provide enough processing power, which would be around 23ms of latency plus converter latency. Without hardware monitoring you would need to deactivate a load of plugins in order to be able to lower the buffer to something useable.

Hardware monitoring is very useful in this situation because you can pull a sound using outboard and overdub with no perceivable change in the session or issue with hearing yourself 23ms+ after you play a note, which would be very unpleasant.

If you are only ever using a DAW to run a couple of amp sims then it won't be an issue.
If you are trying to record and mix your own tracks then you will come up against this problem all the time- it is the reason why hardware monitoring exists.

I'm on Reaper, and I use "freeze track/save item and online FX" option as I go. You can easily recall your settings if you want to re-track or edit a sound. This way you end up with wav stems ready for mixing, and low latency as a by-product. I use a lot of VST instruments, Kontakt libraries, Nebula/Acustica programs and VST FX, so this works for me as my projects tend to be quite heavy on CPU resources if taken as a whole.

Branshen

Okay. Thanks all for the input. I've placed my order for a Babyface from Juno. I know exactly what I'm getting and will work around the quirks of the interface (like no independent volume for phones out 3/4). There's always potential for future expansion via ADAT so I can upgrade bit by bit if the need ever arises. 

goldtop

I think you'll be happy. I came very close to buying a Babyface, but ended up with a UFX (only because I hate plugging and unplugging stuff and cable clutter).

When I saw that RME reprogrammed the FPGA in the original Babyface to add a Class Compliant mode for use with the iPad, I knew they were the sort of company that looked after their existing customers.