Zoom LiveTrack L-20

Steinberg Lounge Computer/Studio Hardware & Setup
#1

Hi I thought I would give my impressions of the new L-20 from Zoom. I didn’t buy it as a audio interface for Cubase. I really just wanted it for recording bands on location. My Normal mixing desk was the Yamaha n12. Anyway I hooked it up to my PC and loaded the driver not really expecting too much (Mine is an old 1st generation i7 clocked from 3.2 to 4 with 18Gig memory) I was pleasantly surprised to find I can get the buffers down to 64 Samples and can play SD3 drum VST without any perceivable latency. I also tried playing back the test project and could play this back faultlessly at 96. I’ve done a lot of testing with it and it really is a good audio interface as well as live recorder to SD card. What is good is that it records to wav so projects can be brought into Cubase when I bring it home. In Cubase it shows up as 16 mono tracks and 2 stereo tracks. Sound quality is really good as well.

After trying this for a week. I sold my n12 as there seemed no point in having two desks when I can use this one to cover both purposes. Also the selling price of a n12 was getting lower due to the lack of firewire these days.

I hope they keep up with driver updates as I see a few post with problems on the R8/16/24 units

#2

Hi, I see that you are experienced user of L-20, so I have question about audio interface in built in this device. My own just arrived last Thursday, so I have started to explore his possibilities and… I’m a bit disappointed by the interface. I have set interface to 48kHz/96 samples and I see in Cubase that latency is a little bit large… 12ms roundtrip. Interesting is that input latency showed by Cubase is only 2ms. The remainig 10ms is consumed by output. Could you tell me please how it looks in your case? L-20 is very nice device but due to the huge audio interface latency, I’m thinking about return this stuff. I’m also an owner of Behringer UFX1204 and this device with parameters set as I mentioned above, have only 7,5ms roundtrip latency, so almost 2 times less.

#3

Sorry I had no notification you replied to my post. I will take a look tomorrow. I don’t go by the numbers though as they are not that reliable. I play my td30 Roland drums to trigger superior drummer 3 and set buffers to 64. At those settings there is no discernible latency. I use 44.1 by the way which is standard in the uk but you should get lower latency with a higher sample rate. I bought it because I need to record live. I find the working latency fine.

#4

Thanks for your response! In the meantime I have performed some tests using RTL utlity to measure roundtrip latency and the results are not encouraging :frowning:. All those tests has been performed @48 kHz using i8700/16GB system.

  • 24 samples - 11,208 ms
  • 32 samples - 11,542ms
  • 64 samples - 12,875ms
  • 96 samples - 14,208ms
  • 128 samples - 15,542ms
  • 256 samples -20,875ms
  • 512 samples - 31,542ms
  • 1024 samples - 52,875ms
    As you can see, the results are really, I would say, disappointing… at least for me. I Have also repeated those test using ASIO4ALL drivers and the result was almost the same… a bit worse but little slightly.
    Interesting is that I have tried to find something about components used to build interface in this device but I not found anything at all about this. Nothing about DSP chip, nothing about A-D-A converters. Usually, there are some information about such a things in the reviews but not in this case… there is nothing about this on the internet.
#5

That is quite odd as I have an old FireWire interface which reports better latency but does not feel as immediate. I think if it feels ok then why look for problems. Unless you are having problems with high latency?

By the way I didn’t buy mine to work with Cubase. I bought it for recording to SD card live performances. When I tried it in my studio I found the latency was as good as my old Yamaha n12 so I started to use it. The monitor outs are also great for different headphone mixes.

I use SD3 drums and play them from my td30 kit without noticing latency at 64. I also have no problem playing keyboards in either. It’s not what I would have chosen for my home studio if I didn’t need it for live recordings but it works well for me.