Desperate with H/W Latency
 

Greetings all. I've looked all over the Web and this forum for help. I've spent countless hours trying to eliminate the latency from my external HW compressor. I watched a video I found online I thought would help but it didn't. The video I'm referring to is at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yglhg7S3DXk&t=182s

I tried the directions in that video several times. It looks pretty simple - recording a click track dry, and recording it going through the outboard compressor. When zooming way in on the clicks, I see no latency looking at the waveform. Since I don't see any latency, I can't update the hardware insert delay settings to compensate.

However, when ever I use this compressor in a session, the latency is terrible.

Any help would be much appreciated!

--Thanks!

Re: Desperate with H/W Latency
 

What compressor are you trying to use? Unless its something really special, I would stay in the box and avoid the hassle.

Re latency, its a cumulative function of several things:
1-Conversion time(D>A and A>D going out and in) as all converters take some time(usually around 1.2ms at 48K) and different brands can have slightly different times.
2-playback buffer(the higher the setting, the more latency.
3-plugin latency in your session(setting MIX window view to show delay compensation will show you that in samples). Less than 10-11 samples is tough to hear, but the higher the numbers, the more latency.
4-plugin latency on the MASTER track also adds to the total(and delay compensation does not compensate for MASTER track latency.
5-(not knowing how knowledgeable you are, and not intending any insult), remember that Delay Compensation works by finding the track with the most latency, and then making all the other tracks later to match(IOW, nothing ever gets moved earlier:o)

In my commercial studio in Nashville, I had plenty of really good hardware and the setup was wired to allow hardware inserts, but in the 5 years I ran the place, besides testing to make sure it all worked, when it came to mixing, I used hardware exactly zero times. I tracked thru lots(always careful not to overdo things). Mixing in the box comes with may benefits and zero hassle(my opinion):D