Excessive UAD Latency in Pro Tools on 2019 iMac

[musicman691]

Like I said I included the screenshot so people here could have a clearer idea of what's going on. There's something people have completely missed and are still missing - the op was talking about having issues during mixdown and not tracking. What would help is if one didn't have to have a Toontrack account to read and post on a lot of their forums. Then there wouldn't be all this ruffled feathers thing happening.

Another thing that doesn't help is the OP isn't exactly timely in responding over on the SD3 forum thread.

[s.d. finley]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Exactly. Darryl doesn't use UAD so that kind of removes him from being a be all/end all authority on them.

I would like to add that I maintain 8 Pro Tools based Mac systems ALL with a variety of UAD hardware and Spark software. Some have UAD2 only, some have Spark only and a few have both. I personally use 5 of these myself for recording and mixing.

Four systems at SugarHill, 2 systems and my personal studio, one system at a local record label and my own personal laptop based system.

I am very intimately familiar with the UAD ecosystem pertaining to Mac based Pro Tools systems.

[s.d. finley]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

So what? You still do not seem to understand UAD DSP plugins latency.

The latency the OP is reporting is seeing is *exactly* what is expected. (2 x fixed playback buffer) + UAD plugin additional latency.

I don't know why you felt it was necessary to post on a thread where stuff is exactly working as expected and start implying it is not and throwing around confusing comments about latency. Not any of those comments actually explain what the latency components are or how to calculate what the expected latency is.

You make claims about things not being like I describe, or like UAD themselves document, and Pro Tools being different than other DAWs, referring to information on the web and yet do you not provide any links to that. If you have useful information then why not just share it. Not doing so leaves the impression you might be referring to incorrect information on the web, or that stuff just does not exist.

Given how complex this all gets in sessions, the frequent confusion caused by split buffer sizes, different UAD settings, and too many latency related bugs in Pro Tools, it is not surprising that users can get the impression that UAD DSP latency is weird or nondeterministic. Maybe you are seeing a bug, maybe you actually know more than it seems from your posts here so far, but nobody has any hope of either helping your understanding what you are seeing or seeing if indeed things are broken until you actually provide enough info like sample rate, HW buffer size, is this a live signal path, to go with your screenshot.

I thought you were done with this thread. You may infer whatever you want from my statement. SR was 48k, buffer was 256 and I switched to 512. No live signal at all. I am not seeing a BUG. You don't understand how UAD DSP works with PT. In my pic of a PT session nothing is broken. In the OPs pic something is strange and he is getting more latency than I would normally expect as I stated earlier. Other people on this thread mention how there is bunches of latency for UAD in PT. Unfortunately UA is very ambiguous on latency and PT.

It is so pointless discussing UAD DSP with a non user.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by s.d. finley

I thought you were done with this thread. You may infer whatever you want from my statement. SR was 48k, buffer was 256 and I switched to 512. No live signal at all. I am not seeing a BUG. You don't understand how UAD DSP works with PT. In my pic of a PT session nothing is broken. In the OPs pic something is strange and he is getting more latency than I would normally expect as I stated earlier. Other people on this thread mention how there is bunches of latency for UAD in PT. Unfortunately UA is very ambiguous on latency and PT.

It is so pointless discussing UAD DSP with a non user.

...but surely as a UAD DSP user... you would know 2103 samples of latency is exactly what you would expect with SSL E Channel in a Pro Tools session running at 96kHz sample rates?

[s.d. finley]

Originally Posted by LDS

...but surely as a UAD DSP user... you would know 2103 samples of latency is exactly what you would expect with SSL E Channel in a Pro Tools session running at 96kHz sample rates?

yup I didn't realize the OP was at 96k now that makes sense and OP isn't showing any extra latency since he is running his session at 96khz.

[s.d. finley]

I emailed Drew at UA and asked him if could provide and more eloquent explanation of the UAD2 latency in Pro Tools.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by s.d. finley

I emailed Drew at UA and asked him if could provide and more eloquent explanation of the UAD2 latency in Pro Tools.

If it is anything like the explanation given about the removal of LiveTrack mode in version 11... we won't get any real answers at all!

I honestly just think UA is actively trying to shift its user base to newer products by making older ones worse and worse. I used to be able to get away with tracking using UAD-2 plugins on a PCIe Octo card in Pro Tools using LiveTrack mode. Now I would basically need an Apollo interface to do it... or native plugin equivalent.

UAD-2 DSP is a dying beast, which isn't surprising given the Sharc 21369 is 20 years old!

[albee1952]

Not sure if this will matter to anyone, but here is my own experience with UA Quad and Duo cards on my PT system between PT versions 11 thru 2018. Because of the round trip to/from the card, every UAD plugin caused a minimum of 1143(give or take a few) samples. For me, this made their plugins useless during any kind of tracking. For a while, I used several, but kept them inactive until mix, but even that became tedious, so I finally gave up and moved on(selling the cards). I can't speak for the new crop of native UA plugins. If you use the UA hardware to process, you will suffer a lot of latency as that is the nature of the beast.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Not sure if this will matter to anyone, but here is my own experience with UA Quad and Duo cards on my PT system between PT versions 11 thru 2018. Because of the round trip to/from the card, every UAD plugin caused a minimum of 1143(give or take a few) samples. For me, this made their plugins useless during any kind of tracking. For a while, I used several, but kept them inactive until mix, but even that became tedious, so I finally gave up and moved on(selling the cards). I can't speak for the new crop of native UA plugins. If you use the UA hardware to process, you will suffer a lot of latency as that is the nature of the beast.

I've been able to use UAD-2 plugins with Pro Tools since 2008 to present day with them only ever adding the inherent latency in the DSP processing itself. SSL E channel only adds 55 samples of latency. Ampeg B15N adds 0 samples or latency. Etc. Etc.

Just turn Livetrack mode on in the plugin, and turn off extra buffering in the UAD panel. Done. If you don't have access to Livetrack mode, its because you have updated to version 11 (version 10 is still qualified with current operating systems)... or because you have a UAD-2 firewire device in your system...


Screenshot attached... guess which plugin doesn't have livetrack mode enabled?