Re: Absolute Hi End Converters

Soundhaspriority wrote:

This is what my AudioFire 12 setup can do:

1.The alignment of the track that is in the process of being recorded can be compensated by a DAW setting, at least with Cubase.

Yawn! That makes the track come out in the right place when you play it back. It has nothing to do with input monitoring.

2. The AudioFire 12, like most other firewire devices, has a built-in DSP mixer, in effect, a wire from input to output, with great flexibility.

That's where you've fallen for the hype. I've used the phrase "zero latency monitoring, for large values of zero." That DSP mixer doesn't take very much time to process the signal, but it needs to be converted from analog to digital before it gets there, and back to analog so you can hear it. So you never get away from the A/D/A conversions, each of which take about 1.5 msec with modern converters. It's not actually the conversion process that takes the time, it's the filters which are built from delay lines. I won't argue that 1.5-3 msec delay will throw off your playing, but if you're singing or speaking and listening to your own voice on headphones with slight delay, you'll hear the effect of comb filtering when the delayed sound in the phones combines with the real time sound that your throat makes.

The only way to get around this delay is to connect the analog input (say the mic preamp output) to the monitor output with a piece of wire, or through an analog mixer. The lowly TASCAM US-122 did this but everybody else seems to want to use a digital mixer, which means A/D and D/A conversion delays between input and output.

3. The only kind of latency that cannot be compensated involves the use of realtime effects. The latency involved here is large.

None of those problems existed when we had analog recorders and consoles. We could still build equipment that works properly, but it would sell for more than $1.49 and nobody would buy it.


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