I’m using a culture vulture normally as insert on stems or master.
But now I would like to put it in parallel on a bus and send tracks to it.
Problem is I have some phase. I clicked the Measure delay (while play with no sound as I understood ?) and delay is 0 (it’s positive with digital analog outboards.)
I tried to bounce (real time) and I still have that phase in the end making this parallel configuration not working for me.
Is there a way to do it that i’m missing ?
thx for the help.
Analog gear, and most certainly a compressor, has highly unpredictable resuls when it comes to deleay measurement.
You should measure the delay while the system is running (Play) and indeed without sending audio. But it might be that your compressor will not “react” to silense. So try to measure the delay with sending a beep or something. You will also notice that the delay can vary according the ratio or any other setting on your analog gear. It might even fluctuate with the amount of xompression applied.
From my experiences, analogue compressors do not usually create too many phase problems when aligned properly with the measured delay, unlike with digital devices. You can do parallel compression if PDC works right.
However, you are seeing 0 samples delay, which is very likely to be caused by the false report of latency from the ASIO audio interface. Some interfaces like RMEs or even some high-end Yamaha interfaces report values that are not appropriate for Cubase/Nuendo, when that’s the case, you will see 0 on the delay time display of the external effects instance. And it’s actually minus something, but Cubase/Nuendo cannot use negative delay there. Currently there is no easy way to work around this problem. (Devs @ Steinberg don’t want to change this because having a negative delay there is the misuse of the driver. They think it’s down to vendors to report proper values and Steiny are right. Although, IMO they should cover these cases by adding negative delay.)
There is a workaround in analogue domain though. Instead of making 1 external effect for your compressor, make 2 of them and set a/d d/a pair for the 2nd one. Connect a set of cables between the d/a and the a/d. This “cable” external effect will have exactly the same delay and phase shift as the compressor but of course dry, so you can mix this signal with a little grouping on the VST mixer (make a group, route to 2 groups from sends, cut its output, insert each of them to the 2 groups). This is actually the most accurate way to do parallel analogue compression.