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  #1  
Old 02-05-2023, 11:18 AM
MarkH MarkH is offline
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Default Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Curious if anyone is using the Carbon ADAT ports with something like a Ferrofish to support Hardware Inserts like EQ and Compression. I assume latency needs to be manually adjusted in HW Insert Delay since the Ferrofish AD/DA cannot be automatically calculated by Pro Tools. Feedback is appreciated! Thanks!

Regards,
Mark
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  #2  
Old 02-05-2023, 12:38 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

I don't have a Carbon. But I can't imagine there is anything Carbon specific here.

But yes there is no way for ADAT devices to communicate their latency back to an interface. I've posted about all this before on DUC.

You should be able to get this to work fine, but the usability of all this in Pro Tools is embarrassingly bad. The worse of any main DAW out there (no automatic delay comp ping function, no flexibility in setting insert delays in ms or samples etc., serious bugs, etc.). You would think that Avid would want to make the outboard hardware mixer and hardware insert experience for Pro Tools users the best in the industry given the higher-end pro use of that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Setup>IO>HW Insert Delay lets you correct for H/W latency, intended to really compensate for the external insert boxes with internal latency (i.e. digital effects boxes). But because of this it only compensates for actual delays, and that may not be what you need to do.

All Pro Tools will do here (when you enable delay compensation) is naively apply the sum of the input and output latency it knows about for the Carbon analog ports to the ADAT ports. That may be too much or not enough for the ADAT converters you are using. One thing that confuses users is: if that interface analog latency is larger than what the ADAT box actually has then the delay compensation will shift your signal to negative time and you need to correct that by providing a negative manual delay to the track delay compensation (you can't add negative delays in Setup>IO>HW Insert Delay. To keep stuff clean just ignore Setup>IO>HW Insert Delay ... leave all at 0 (... which means delay comp will still apply the default compensation using latency data for the Carbon analog I/O ports) unless you have outboard digital boxes with large delay. Get everything working with straight through cable inserts first. You should be able to send clicks or claps or similar signals though the H/W insert and measure that delay accurate to a sample or so. Measure the offset with delay comp enabled once at the sample rate you are going to use, and apply that to all the tracks using H/W inserts in the manual delay comp +/- field. Do not change stuff that affects I/O latency. LLM off and ignore errors *not* checked.

There are bugs with delay compensation with LLM that have been discussed here many times, If you see large wrong delay comp corrections of 2k or 4k samples then you are seeing that bug. Easy to work around (disable LLM for a start).
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  #3  
Old 02-05-2023, 01:10 PM
MarkH MarkH is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Thanks Darryl, this aligns with what I was thinking. Agree that doing a ping like Studio One, Logic, Cubase/Nuendo would make a lot of sense.
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  #4  
Old 02-05-2023, 01:22 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Yes it would. And I can sound like I'm arguing both sides here..

I do wish Avid would invest some engineering effort into improving this.. there are multiple things that the other DAWs do in this area that is not as good they could be... and Avid could do better than those DAWS, but right now they are so far behind it's laughable.

On the other hand (other side here). With a little care it hopefully should be possible to set this up and get it working perfectly. There is at least one work-around-able bug here that I mentioned (found by fantastic work by another user here not me). With multiple RME interfaces, MADI and ADAT outboard converters, analog and digital inserts etc. this all works sample accurate for me if set up as described. And who knows with Carbon with it's other latency bug(s?) if you might hit other issues. But try to get it working with straight through cables and a simple session to start with. If you just want to play and don't have the Ferrofish yet you can loopback the ADAT cables and play with adjusting the (negative) delay for that insert/loopback.
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  #5  
Old 02-05-2023, 01:36 PM
MarkH MarkH is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Yes there are things where Avid feels very far behind. I also work with Media Composer and there are some things which are excellent like BIN management and sharing, but others where MC feels way behind. Like the timeline can only be as long as the length of all clips. This makes it hard to try alternate sequences with other clips and swap them around. Doing this in Premiere or Resolve is common and while there are workaround in MC it's a hassle. Symphony color correction and grading hasn't evolved in years.

I previously worked on an HDX system with an Antelope Galaxy 64 interface. It has an 'Auto' setting for ADC with HDX but it's broken on all Antelope interfaces with HDX ports and Antelope won't fix it. I had to create HW Insert profiles for different sample rates. I found Antelope suffers from the same issue as Focusrite Red HDX where they are emulating Avid 16x16 Digital I/O and if you use the Analog DB25 for external inserts it's off by 20 samples because of the conversion. I made a long thread on Gearspace/Slutz where I did throrough testing and the number of people who reached out to me frustrated with Antelope was pretty extensive. I've heard Apogee Symphony mkI and mkII analog ADC is spot on.
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  #6  
Old 02-05-2023, 02:07 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Yep, in the world of DigiLink third party interfaces have to emulate an Avid DigiLink box... and Pro Tools just has the latencies for those boxes hardwired into it. When dealing with CoreAudio or ASIO interfaced Pro Tools uses the input and output latencies provided by the driver. And where the drivers provide the correct latency info (I've never seen one not) then Pro Tools correctly calculates H/W insert latencies with those third party interfaces. To that extent Pro Tools *not* using DigiLink is more flexible/correct with different third party interfaces than with Pro Tools using those third party DigiLink interfaces that do not precisely emulate the Avid box latencies. But all have the problem with outboard third party S/PDIF, ADAT, MADI etc. converters. But all those are correctable after taking latency measurements.

There seems some confusion out there, possibly based on a few sentences of unclear writing in the Pro Tools Reference Guide, that Pro Tools non-Ultimate and/or non-Digilink does not provide insert latency compensation and that is somehow a feature of Ultimate/Digilink. Pro Tools non-Ultimate/non-DigiLink does correctly uses the driver provided latency data to do this, but that only gets the latency correct for the built in converters in an interface. It just could all be much easier and more flexible with a ping function.

The whole DigiLink ecosystem is becoming more and more a knotted ball of twine that Avid customers are trapped in and Avid should be giving them a way out. And the answer hopefully will not be Dante or AVB, or Dante *and* AVB.
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  #7  
Old 02-05-2023, 02:47 PM
dominicperry dominicperry is online now
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

I would tread very carefully here. Although I personally have not experienced any of the weird latency correction problems reported in other Carbon threads, it is a problem which doesn't seem to be properly fixed yet.

From what I've read, the more complex your routing structure is within PT, the more likely you will be to see a problem. I would guess that to route out to hardware and back in to Carbon would need some of the complicated bus/aux stuff that is causing problems.

It may be that with DSP turned off - i.e. when mixing rather than tracking - you won't see the problems. But worth being ready to send your Carbon back if you do have problems.

This is probably the biggest thread...
https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=417631

Interestingly no one has added to it since the latest release (2022.12). Maybe it's all fixed now - someone needs to try it out and report back to that thread.

Dominic
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  #8  
Old 02-05-2023, 03:00 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Quote:
Originally Posted by dominicperry View Post
I would tread very carefully here. Although I personally have not experienced any of the weird latency correction problems reported in other Carbon threads, it is a problem which doesn't seem to be properly fixed yet.

From what I've read, the more complex your routing structure is within PT, the more likely you will be to see a problem. I would guess that to route out to hardware and back in to Carbon would need some of the complicated bus/aux stuff that is causing problems.
The question was simply about using H/W inserts. That does not imply any complex routing (also does not mean that there is not).

I would just try stuff, it is not hard at all to set up hardware inserts with proper delay compensation once you understand what is happening, and the OP pretty much knew all this already. If a Carbon related bug comes up, the problem should hopefully not be too difficult to identify as a Carbon problem.

I also suspect that those Carbon issues are DSP related and won't show up... since the question was about mixing.

Sadly my understanding from IRL discussions with Carbon users was the problems have not been fixed. But, yes updates from Avid would seem to be useful here, great you are asking that.
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  #9  
Old 02-05-2023, 05:15 PM
Progear Progear is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Being using carbon with the ferrofish 16 as hardware inserts with no issues. Mostly analog compressors as inserts and 2 eq’s. I have not seen a reason for delay compensation, i also use the Hardware inserts for mixing, not tracking.

Hope this helps
Adam
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  #10  
Old 02-05-2023, 05:29 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Hardware Inserts when Mixing - ADC

Quote:
Originally Posted by Progear View Post
I have not seen a reason for delay compensation.
What does that mean?

You are running with ADC disabled?

Or that the ADC automatic delay compensation correction is close enough you have not needed to manually adjust it?

I assume the later, but would be great to be clear... not delay compensating a HW insert is likely to be quite noticeable and normally a "reason to use delay compensation".
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