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Originally Posted by bass man  OK , i am little bit confused here  !
Are you saying that if i have recorded like lets say 8 tracks
5 for the drums , 1 for the sax ,one for the double bass and one for the guitar and u use lets say Waves r comp on the bass and tl eq on the guitar that the bass and the guitar are going to have latency in the mix or monitoring and come "later" than the OHs or sax ????
Is that what you are saying , that the plug ins are having latency ?
If you have two channels one with plug ins and one with out they wont be in the same place ? When you bounce the mix treated and untreated tracks are not going to be at the same place ?
Please answer ,this sounds scary and i never noticed that in my mixes ... |
Yep this is a problem that is solved to varying extents by varying DAWs. Pro Tools LE is uniquely lame in this category as it doesn't make any attempt to delay compensate at all. Many of the plugins that ship with it don't have any latency. But your Ren Comp iirc has a fixed latency of 64 samples...so tracks run through it in PTLE will play back 64 samples later than everything else. This will subtly affect the groove of your tracks in a way that might escape you but you'll still feel it, which is the worst kind of bug...your mix sucks and you don't know why!
Worse is when you try to parallel compress or do something else where phase variance shows up as nasty comb filtering. Then you really hear it...maybe that isn't worse since you're at least alerted to the problem and have to fix it or give up that strategy. You can also get slap echoes you didn't want.
DAWs other than PTLE try to solve this but break down when going out on hardware inserts. Some DAWs may have solved that problem too (Sonar 7 is mentioned above?) but I've never tried them to see. Some people think you just set it for your hardware and you can then forget it but that is not my experience. Also it appears that firewire has variable latency (about 20 samples on my machine) from startup to startup, meaning that you will have to recompensate every time you boot your machine!
Programmers would generally like to do something sexy like a new virtual instrument or whatever rather than solve a nagging pain in the ass like this. It's dirty laundry, made more complex by the need for 3rd party cooperation, and it's unseemly to market a bug's absence as a feature.
I don't tolerate any comb filtering (though I haven't gone to the extent of sub-samples! Mr. thrillfactor, do you realize that the comb filters on subsample phase variations will only affect frequencies above Nyquist? Or have I got that wrong somehow?) or unwanted slap delays but I will tolerate latency variations of a few samples here and there which don't cause comb filtering because the tracks are isolated. I check every mix though to be certain.