[nst7]

I think this is a well kept secret about HD Native, and I'm surprised Avid haven't focused on promoting this more.

I don't know exactly what goes on under the hood, but here is my theory:

We know that these new Avid HD interfaces actually convert faster, being a new design with a simplified path to the converters. They've promoted that fact heavily and is part of the reason for lower latency in general, even at the same buffer settings vs. other setups.

So for this reason, even audio recording is lower latency than it otherwise might be. But, with VI's, that is cut in half again because VI's are only using D to A conversion, not the full round trip of A/D and D/A that recording audio uses. So that helps a lot.

Also, it may be that the D/A portion converts even faster than the A/D portion (from what I understand about converter design, D/A is a simpler design).

And, since your sessions are at 96k, that cuts the latency down even more (vs. 44/48), for both audio and VI's.

So this makes perfect sense. I haven't really used 88/96k much yet, but even at 44k, I've noticed not much latency with VI's even at the 1024 buffer. In fact I've sometimes just messed around with a VI in a session, and forgot that I was at a 1024 buffer, because it just wasn't that noticeable.

And as mentioned, if you're at 96k, I'm pretty sure that cuts the latency in half yet again.


So this is my explanation. I'd be interested to know if there was anything else going on under the hood that we don't know about.


When PT11 comes out, with it's more efficient processing and handling of VI's and RAM, combined with a powerful computer, HD Native could be a killer rig for a composer.