Latency using 16 digi IO and ensemble?

[Rockman413]

If I get a 16*16 digital Avid HD IO, and I use Ensemble as the mic pre, I connect Ensemble to Avid HD IO 16 digital VIA ADAT, would this kill the advantage of low latency that HD Native/HDX card has?

Thanks!

[nst7]

It wouldn't totally kill it. There's 2 parts to the low latency of HD Native. 1 is the design of the card and the fact that it's PCIe based vs. Firewire/USB.

The other part is with the HD IO analog units (the 8x8 or 16x16), because of the new design, they actually do the conversion faster than most other units. This would not apply to the HD IO digital, because it would be dependent on whatever you're using for conversion (in this case the Ensemble).

So it would kill half of the advantage, but not all of it.

There's probably better and more cost effective solutions than that setup. It sounds like a bizarre workaround.

You've been asking a lot of questions about these things, it would probably help if you told us how many ins/outs you need, how many preamps you need, and what you're doing (you had mentioned surround in your other posts). And do you have a monitor controller, and does it also do surround?