Interesting, related ‘interview’ on the Sternberg site, ‘Let’s Talk about Cubase’ at http://www.steinberg.net/en/artists/stories/2016/cubase_story.html “Georg Conrads, Technical Lead Audio Engine, Christian Dettner, Product Planning Manager, and Clyde Sendke, Director for Product Planning, to talk about its creative tools, the much lauded audio engine and more”.
‘Georg: At the moment, Cubase and Nuendo share their source code for the most part’.
There are many reasons why Pro Tools has become the industry standard, but two of the main reasons seemed to be the “guaranteed processing capacity” and “I/O latency for professional use” that came with the use of the dedicated DSP card.
My main point is that I always find it strange that manufacturers of native processing DAW software do not seem to be making any serious efforts to resolve issues related to latency. In that regard, they still rely on direct monitoring of the audio interface. In terms of processing power, computers have become more than fast enough, and there is always the option of selecting Universal Audio’s UAD if processing power is still insufficient. If only issues related to latency can be overcome, native processing DAW could become a system that could take on Pro Tools|HDX…
Clyde: This is a very interesting question indeed. The first point I would like to highlight is that as of Cubase Pro 8, we have introduced ASIO-Guard 2 that minimizes input and output latency to a minimum 32 samples. Minimizing latency down to this level was simply not possible with previous versions.I do need to clarify one point here, and that is about not taking issues related to latency seriously. Overcoming this problem is one of the topics that we have focused on the most over the past few years. Unfortunately I am unable to provide any more details today. Please wait to see what the future has in store for Cubase and Nuendo.
FWIW, I find this somewhat misdirected: ASIO guard is about input latency and as they indicate, most now use inout monitoring and an audio interfaces that increasingly allow much control of that process, e.g.: RME, UAD etc with 'print to tape FX if required etc etc. Chasing the necessity to lower input monitoring latency through the DAW would seem well off topic these days & monitoring off-source is old school (to vs from tape), worked well then, works well now. I’d get over that one and concentrate on the mix, routing, output and CPU overheads associated with pretending that a DAW is a studio.
Back to the point of this thread: less about ASIO & input buffer then; more focus on multithreading and mix down power and clearly this is where Cubase /Neuendo lag against ProTools, Logic, Reaper and the rest.
