Cubase and Dante Via: Latency Issues: Ideas welcomed

Steinberg Lounge
1

Dear all
having read most of the Dante posts in this forum, it seems that latency and Dante was a problem of the past.

However, here is my challenge and maybe some outside the box thinking can help me:

My little basement studio consists of two rooms (10 m distance from each other, but given the architecture of the house 18m cable required).

One room is for recording loud stuff (Brass, Drums) and one is serving as a control room. So roughly this means up to six microphones from this room out and maybe three cues for headphones in.

How to connect them best? Analog mulitcore is not an option, as the required holes in the walls are just not bearable. Optical ADAT does not make the distance. USB cables neither. So I have started to try out Ethernet. I am on a budget but I had some spare equipment to start with

So I decided to connect the rooms as follows

A RME babyface and a fast desktop PC for Microphones and Headphone.
Connected via a gigabit switch to the control room PC (using an RME UC as audio device)
Dante Via and Dante Controller for routing.

DAW: Cubase 10.5 with Dante VIA as a soundcard. Everything clocked to 48khz

Good news: It works.
Bad news: The latency is killing me. According to Cubase it is 30ms (or roughly an 8th note at 120 bpm). So when I record, Cubase receives the recording just a little bit too late. SO I have to manually move the file on the timeline to sync playback and recording)

I have found very little advice on this, so I assume latency could be much lower, it is only my own dismal set-up that’s wrong.
Here are my questions:

  1. Is there a smarter way to use DANTE Via for this (I cannot be the only person connecting two rooms with Dante)
  2. Can Cubase itself accomodate? (There is a button called recording latency compensation)
  3. Is there a smarter, better way to connect these two rooms? I tried VST Connect but this a different story (buggy software, disgruntled users in the forums etc.)

Thanks so much for any advice and ideas
Oliver

1 Like
2

I doubt you will ever get reliable low latency figures with Dante Via

3

Thanks Sven. Any better suggestion then? Really open to any idea.
Oliver

4

how much cat5/6 do you have ? (analog) Audio over cat5/6 works pretty well.

http://soundtools.com/audio-over-cat5-systems-page.html

5

after all, Dante Via is not made for real low latency

Dante alone is capable of very low latency, but you have to buy the Dante Accelerator Card to get under 2ms

1 Like
6

@Dr Yep. You saved my day. thanks so much. Your idea was the solution to my problem. I went for the budget Thomann version (40 EUR). It transmits and receives analog audio via my existing Cat7 installation.
Oliver

7

perfect - I bought some of those too :slight_smile:

is your Cat7 shielded or are you running without ?

8

CAT7 is always shielded, if not it’s not CAT7

9

:smiley: of course

10

Dear all
thanks so much for all your input and your valuable comments. I solved the problem for 75 EUR. Here’s my solution:

  1. Dante VIA does not provide the latencies required without some hefty hardware invest. So how else can one connect two rooms digitally /via LAN?

  2. Some of you pointed me towards analog adio over lan transmitter. The cheapest one was from Thomann for 40 EUR
    https://www.thomann.de/de/the_sssnake_c … gKUsfD_BwE

Now I was able to transmit two Channels to and fro one room to the other

  1. But: This box also transmits an AES signal. Since my RME UC transmits and receives AES (it just takes an RCA to XLR cable) I can send and reive two channels auf digital audio.

  2. In the other room I am using a RME BAbyface. Unfortunatly it only has an optical in/out. Enter Studiospare’s little box
    RED507 Toslink S/PDIF - AES/EBU Converter - UK Stock - Studiospares It converts a Toslink signal into the AES format.

Outcome: I can send and receive 4 channels digital audio plus two analog signals between these two rooms. Which is enough for my purpose.
Thanks for your help

11

but your solution has nothing to do with LAN
you are using CAT7 cables without any networking technology included

https://www.cat-core.de/

there exists a solution where you can transmit fast ethernet and analog audio over the same cable