Eleven Rack & Logic 9 - Again Basic Questions

[MR290378]

Hi Guys,

I know there have been posts around the questions below but I am not sure I can extract a clear cut answer to the following:

- Do I understand correctly that Eleven Rack can be used within Logic 9 as an interface, and one can also benefit from its DSP units, i.e. low latencies and thereby an overall DAW performance improvement?

- Do I understand correctly that there is no AVID 11R software plugin that works with Logic?

- Do I understand correctly the Eleven Rack Microphone Preamp and D/A converters are definitely not better that the Apogee 2 Duet?

Thanks in advance for any helpful thoughts.

Cheers,
Matt

[adamqlw]

- Do I understand correctly that Eleven Rack can be used within Logic 9 as an interface, and one can also benefit from its DSP units, i.e. low latencies and thereby an overall DAW performance improvement?

It can be used in logic as an interface. There is no benefit from its DSP units, they will not provide any hardware acceleration for your plugins or anything like that. The Eleven Rack will function purely as an audio interface, with 8 inputs (guitar, mix, line in x 2, rig out x 2, digital in x 2) and 2 outputs. You CANNOT turn off direct monitoring of the main outputs, so you should turn off monitoring in Logic and may need to utilize a muted patch. There is no overall DAW performance improvement (or detriment)

- Do I understand correctly that there is no AVID 11R software plugin that works with Logic?

This is correct.

- Do I understand correctly the Eleven Rack Microphone Preamp and D/A converters are definitely not better that the Apogee 2 Duet?

No idea on this one.

[MR290378]

Hi!

Thanks for this. What do you mean by "direct monitoring of the main outputs". Are you referring to some sort of pure hardware monitoring at pre-DAW stage that I remember from the Mbox Mini? If that is the case than there would be at least one option of "zero latency monitoring" when recording guitars or vocals through the 11R within Logic. Right?

I recently sold a lot of equipment and now want to have a very simplistic setup that is flexible and still fairly good quality. I use Logic for composing and PT for creating HD-compatible pre-studio mixes... (For years I have had system performance issues with PT and these days I only use it to create rough mixes with high sample buffer rates...;-) )

Cheers,
Matt

[adamqlw]

The only way to disable direct hardware monitoring (i.e. zero latency) is by firing up protools. The drivers do not allow this to be enabled/disabled directly.

The workaround is to disable monitoring when the track is armed, otherwise you will get 2 signals, the direct hardware signal and the one that's gone through Logic. Because of latency, the one through Logic will be off by several milliseconds, causing some phase cancellation or flanging... basically, incredibly annoying and poo-sounding.

In all honesty, you CAN use it as an interface, but it's suboptimal as although you can get the job done you need to jump through a couple of small hoops to get there. It's really only an issue when you are tracking "wet" guitar tracks (rig out over USB), the rest of the time you can have a muted preset on if necessary. Not a deal breaker.... but an irration consdering how easy (I imagine...) it must be to fix this.