Dealing with Latency in the Digital Studio

[cjbdrm]

I only say that because if the playback is late after it was recorded it means it was recorded late... which doesn't have anything to do with latency...

I understand why you would think that, but that's just not true. Any good modern DAW has auto-delay compensation which will line up the tracks correctly regardless of hard drive speed, CPU power, RAM, converter speed, etc.

...you can have your buffer setting cranked.. and as long as you are just hearing the playback of the track without your performance as you are tracking,.. you'll be in time...

That's not necessarily true- again, it depends on the DAW and it's ability to compensate for hardware and software induced latency, and the experience of the engineer to configure it correctly. Every DAW and system is different. That's how it works in yours and mine, but obviously not in this guy's studio...

The only thing I can think of that would do that without there being a data bottleneck is if they put plug ins on the inserts of the input channels,.. so they were writing to the computer with compression/eq ect inline... That would delay the input stage before it get written to the drive.....

Again, this is a function of the DAW. It has to be configured correctly, or compensated for after the fact. Which requires RTFM.

I don't know all the details, but it sounds like a Protools LE (native) system and an inexperienced engineer. Latency would mostly be a non-issue in a Protools TDM or HD system, where processor cards external to the computer handle the processing, and the DAW has Auto delay compensation of some sort.

To manually compensate for latency, a quick and dirty solution is to record a click track, play it back thru headphones and place the headphones around a microphone. Then line up the wave forms of the two click tracks and zoom in to determine the amount of delay, then nudge all the overdubbed tracks by that amount to line up correctly. But any good DAW will do this for you...

[chris perra]

I think our disagreement is on what we classify as latency... For me, latency is hearing my performance in the headphones delayed from when I physically play it live,... at the same time,.. I'm playing and listening at the same time.....

When I play a track, and have my buffer setting maxed out at the highest setting It'll be a delay of half a second or more... but that's just the delay of my performance, not the delay of the initial track that I'm playing. There is no delay of that track, because that's the source that I'm playing to.

My live performance regardless of my buffer setting will be recorded in time with the initial source track. The only thing that can be delayed is my live tracks in comparison to source track while I'm playing live

If you play back the performance you just played and it's delayed in comparison to the source track, there's a data bottleneck, or you delayed the performance by putting plugins on inserts of the input channels.

The plug in delay compensation only has to do with in playback mode having some tracks use plugins or different numbers of plugins and others not,. each plug in will delay the signal a bit,.. and if you have 5 plug ins on one, and 1 on the other they will be out of sync by the difference of the number of plug ins.. It will bundle all the tracks and send them out all at once... milliseconds later than if they had no plug ins on them... If anything your performance would wind up being ahead of the source track if that wasn't working properly

if you put them on the inserts of the input channel it could do the same thing...

If he's using protools,.. it has plug in delay compensation.. so regardless of his buffer setting or configuration of his daw. it should perform like cubase or logic or any of the major daws out there.

That's what makes me thing it's more a hardware issue causing a bottleneck of data...

[cjbdrm]

Chris, I disagree about what we are disagreeing about

You're working under the assumption that the problem lies in the hardware or software, and not the engineer...and my thinking is the opposite.

We'll have to agree to disagree...LOL

I just think that problems like latency during monitoring and tracks recorded out of time are products of inexperience. Again, RTFM...

And I'm not trying to jump all over the guy- I've been there, done that, and have several T-shirts...

I'll say this, once I started using a mixer for monitoring during recording and playback, and stopped relying on the I/O device, recording became a much more pleasant experience...so I recommend that to anyone...

I sure hope that guy is spending as much time trying to find a solution as we are talking about it!

[chris perra]

I'll agree to disagree. haha...

I'm thinking it's a hardware issue because of the circumstances.. drums recording later... Hearing later happens all the time,,.. everybody has experienced that...

Recording later doesn't happen very often and is harder to troubleshoot..

And you are right direct monitoring is the way to go, costs a bit more.. but definitely workth it...