New latency...what happened?

I am plugging my guitar into a Focusrite 6i6. I don’t know what happened but now I am getting a noticeable latency when playing the guitar. The latency readout in the studio setup panel is 2ms for in and out. I turned off all plugins on the channel and stereo out also just in case, so this is just listening to the dry signal. When I open the focusrite app and play there is no latency, so its somewhere in cubase.

I pulled up an older project and started playing and no latency at all, so I’m thinking I jacked up a setting somehow in this project but don’t know which one? Buffer is set at 32, set it to 16 and no difference.

Cubase 9.5 Pro

There must be a plugin left that produces the latency. If you really turn all plugins off it should work, just disabling won’t reduce plugin latency. Maybe there are some things active you just don’t see because they’re hidden?!?

Well I turned off the multiband compressor on the stereo out and that fixed it. I’ve had that happen before and I thought just bypassing it would fix it but guess not…thanks

Now I just need to figure the difference between bypassing and effect versus turning it off…

The difference is explained in a few words.

If you insert a plugin the latency compensation happens automatically to keep everything properly time alligned. Great feature, it’s in Cubase since almost forever (SX2).

If you just bypass the plugin, audio passes through unprocessed but the latency compensation still takes place. That enables the user to automate the bypass state of a plugin without interrupting the audio stream by the price of adding the plugin latency to the latency/buffer size of your asio driver. No problem in mixing situations unless you add plenty of latency monsters and the whole project starts to feel sluggy (which means all will work perfectly but the user experience isn’t too snappy anymore).

If you disable the plugin it’s completely out of the equation. You’ll get an interruption of the audio stream by disabling it because the latency compensation gets reverted in that moment. The complete project latency gets reduced by the specific latency value of the plugin and gets snappier by exact that value.

There’s a ‘constrain delay compensation’ button top left of the project window (if hidden make it visible). That function checks for plugins that produce a lot of latency and dis-/re-enables them by pressing the button. Your project will sound different of course but you can play your VSTis or amp sims with less latency - once recording is done it’s just a single click to get back to normal.

Another strategy is direct monitoring through your interface (depending on what you use). Solutions like UA’s Apollo series especially adress situations like recording with plugins that normally produce a lot of latency by outsourcing them to the interface’s dedicated processing power.

Thanks for that…

When still in the recording phase (instead of mixing) it is good practice to make sure the plugins on the master bus are no- or low latency.