I feel like I just discovered a problem (sort of) that I never thought was an issue before. I just upgraded from Cubase 7 to 7.5. I have a Onyx Blackbird and usion ASIO monitoring. My PC is very powerful and I have the Auto Monitoring set to Manual.
Today i was recording Guitar tracks with a Engl head and a SM57. I arm the track to record and then press the monitor button and it sounded like i had a digitial delay pedal on. In the past I used to use tapemachine style setting and whenever I armed a track to record the monitor button would automatically turn on but i never really heard this delay sound. Granted in the past i lived in an apartment so I always used a POD but now today when playing live through an amp and hitting the monitor button there was this delay effect - not drastic but enough to be recognizable. i tried with the POD again and it was not as bad but still a slight delay.
The thing is I was able to record the track without ever hitting the monitor button. I feel like I never was able to record in the past with CuBase 7.0 unless the monitor button was clicked. I mean the recording sounded fine so its not a real issue but I just wanted to check if there is something I can do to fix this or am i losing my mind.
My latency settings read 35.2 miliseconds for input latency and 39.2 miliseconds for output latency.
Is this normal levels and if not how can i lower it because my PC certainly has the horsepower.
Any suggestions or comments appreciated.
That’s not going to work very well for monitoring from Cubase while tracking.
Check to make sure you have the Onyx ASIO driver selected. I’m not familiar with it’s control panel, but you should be able to lower the latency/select a smaller buffer from there.
I can deal with 128 for tracking guitars. Haven’t tried anything higher than that for awhile. Under 10 ms combined in/out is a pretty realistic figure to shoot for, I think.
Are you sure you’re using ASIO dirct monitoring?
What do you get when using External i.e. hardware monitoring?
What happens when you change the value of the Constrain Delay Compensation?
When I mention External I don’t mean External Effects, I’m referring to monitoring via your interface directly.
Theroretically the ASIO driver should be able to control this from Cubase i.e. via the little speaker icon in each track, however this depends on the driver. Monitoring via the interface should have no latency - delay at all. Monitioring via Cubase will as with any other DAW have a certain amount of latency, and it sounds like this is what you’re experiencing.
The term “latency” refers to the “buffering”, i. e. the temporary storing, of small chunks of audio data during various steps of the recording and playback process on a computer. The more and larger those chunks, the higher the latency.
High latency is most irritating when playing VST instruments and when monitoring through the computer, i. e. when listening to a live audio source via the Cubase MixConsole and effects. (see reference manual p.22 for more on this)
So the behavior you discribe is indeed latency. Simply said: the more software you introduce in your audio-path, the more latency you normally will encounter.
The most obvious solution to this is direct monitoring. (i.e. the actually monitoring is taken care of by your hardware that transmits it’ input signal directly to the monitors, and thus bypassing the signal sent to the DAW.
Monitoring a track in the DAW that is being recorded has not allways a use. Certainly when the input is not being modified in the DAW, you should actually be better off with direct monitoring then with monitoring from the DAW.
Only when you actually do some sort of live processing on an audio signal, and that processing is essential for your sound, you should use direct monitoring of the signal sent to the DAW by clicking on the monitor button of that track. If so, this can be a nag for someone who wants to do a live performance exactly due to that latency, so in that case it is absolutely necessary to reduce the buffer sizes to their minimum. (f.e. 128) It should be hard to notice if a signal is processed by a computer with very low buffer settings (with 3 or 4 ms of latency).