Mysterious high latency in Cubase Pro 14

Hi! I have 2 PC computers, one is in my actual studio (i3, 12th gen, 32Gb RAM) and one is in my bedroom (AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32Gb RAM). The bedroom PC is a lot more powerful, but this is the one having this mysterious latency which is about 700-900ms, give or take. This is totally unacceptable. ~100ms and below is somewhat acceptable since I only use VST plugins, I don’t record anything.

For the record, my much weaker studio PC has almost no latency, it works perfectly.

I have been struggling with this for a while now. I have tried everything that I could think of, I even bought another audio interface which made no difference! Then the latency shown in Cubase studio setup window does not reflect the real latency.

The “Audio system” window can show 5ms, 18ms, 35ms, 95ms, etc., with or without ASIO Guard, but I always hear the latency as long as almost one second! I press a key (MIDI keyboard or the piano roll), and the sound comes out almost one second later. I have also checked task manager, anything that could eat the system resources, found nothing. Windows 10 x64 also doesn’t have a latency of its own, because when I test the speaker configuration, the “triple ding” sound comes immediately when I click on either speaker icon, without latency. I also tried different drivers, ASIO and non-ASIO, again no difference.

Currently there’s no difference if I use an internal Sound Blaster or an external audio interface, my Cubase experience is the same, almost unusable. I suspect the problem must be somewhere outside of Cubase, but I don’t really have a clue anymore…

Does anyone have any idea what to do?

Hi,

Could you test your system by using LatencyMon utility, please?

Have you made sure that you have no plugin in the signal path when recording that might add latency? Especially check the Control Room, if you use that, people forget about that. 1 second seems really long though for a plugin latency. Still, best to check.
Quickest check would be to switch on “Constrain Delay Compensation” which will disable all plugins with a latency higher than configured in the settings.
image

(LatencyMon won’t be of any help here because that only tells you whether your system is able to handle realtime audio without buffer underruns (and even that not reliably)

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This, my friend, is apparently a magic button. :open_mouth: I activated it, and the latency was gone, and even the audio performance monitor is now much more relaxed. I didn’t know about that button. As for the LatencyMon, it was all green and okay, I ran it for a few minutes.
I noticed that it mostly disabled FabFilter Pro-Q 4 plugins, even though they are important. I have several of them in the project. No idea why they cause this, I don’t remember this problem with Pro-Q 3, maybe I should go back to 3.

2 things, you can eneable show latency in the mixer, just as you can show\hide the inserts for example. Then you can see which plugins cause this (if it is indeed not control room).
If it is Q4 make sure you have not selected linear phase, as this causes lots of latency. If you eneable show latency in the mixer, you can see which settings cange the latency!

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I didn’t know to look at that, didn’t feel the need until now. Thank you for this tip!
Ozone 11 added over 300ms, sadly.
And one more track that has 250ms, but it has 3 sends, no inserts, and the “send” channels tied to this show only 2-3ms latency, I don’t understand where this 250ms total latency for this channel comes from. The sending itself somehow pumps it up?

Not that I know or noticed. But you can delete the sends and see what happens? Or delete the fx in the send channels?

Disabling those few FX on the send channels didn’t make a difference for me until I disabled all higher latency plugins I found. But I found out why Pro-Q 4 causes latency. Normal EQ doesn’t really make it worse, but the spectral dynamic mode adds 100-120ms to one track which is insane! If Soothe is better, then I’ll use that instead, it was just easier in Pro-Q 4. I just tested Soothe, it added some 45ms I think.

I’m so happy that I learned something important here, and all this frustration is gone. :smiley:
One more thing is strange: in Pro-L 2 (limiter) there’s this oversampling setting below, and the higher I set it the lower the latency for the channel is! So I put 32x which is best, and the channel latency got lower. Makes no sense, but if I trust the latency number, so be it.

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Cheers!

That is in fact a bit weird that higher OS settings will reduce the latency… but if your computer can cope with 32 OS, why not :smile:
I don’t think it is necessary that you frantically hunt down with latency, the “constrain latency” is there for a reason. I have it on a key command (alt-c, which might even be the default), and if I need to play some MIDI, I just activate it, record, and switch it back off. Works fine, sure, sounds a little different, but usually not a problem.

Also, you can configure how much latency is acceptable for you in the preferences, VST-> Delay Compensation Threshold (for Recording), in milliseconds. From the manual:

Minimizes the latency effects of the delay compensation while maintaining the sound of the mix to the greatest possible extent. Only plug-ins with a delay higher than this threshold setting are affected by the Constrain Delay Compensation function. By default, this is set to 0.0 ms, which means that all plug-ins are affected. If you feel that a little latency is acceptable, you can raise this threshold value.

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For recording? Does it include midi recording like playing/recording midi keyboard to a VST synth track? I don’t record instruments (audio), and when I rarely do, it’s only hardware synthesizers.

Yes for any recording. You can enable constrain latency even without recording. The threshold setting will determine which plugins will be disabled when activated. I think 3 to 5ms is acceptable for me on top of the audio driver latency when playing timing critical midi. Of course when playing a pad synth or slow strings it is not that critical

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Yes, Linear phase mode activated somehow.
Linear phase processing needs longer calculation times, that leads to more latency.

You can check this by using Fabfilter Pro-Q. Switching the three modes or switching the LIN setting in Frequency on and off.
I don’t have the complete Ozone Suite, but the switch between analog and digital in Ozone EQ has the same effect.

The latency compensation needs to delay all signals to the timing of the signal with the longest latency. If something in a bus produces latency, all sends will get delayed to enable phase coherencie with all other signals.

The sample time is only half if you double the sample rate.