PTLE ....question on using plug ins

[Benmrx]

I'm thinking about investing some money into mixing (been dumping my $$ into tracking now for about 2 years) and am looking at some plug in options. My only reservation is the PDC...or lack thereof. I've just been using the digirack plugs and I think they've managed to get the delay compensation right for those....or at least they don't cause any phase issues when I put an EQ on the snare, or do some parallel compression....at least none that I hear.

My question is this. Is the delay Soooo bad that you can't really use (say a URS) EQ on the snare without noticing some horrible phasing? Or is it the kind of thing where once you get some things set...then you go back and nudge your tracks to "tighten" things up a bit.

Do alot of you do things like put the same plug in on every drum track even if you're only using one of them and bypassing the rest so all the drums have the same delay?

If the phasing is a serious issue, then I'll probably just stick with the digirack plugs and save up for a nice outboard 2buss comp and EQ that I could also use when tracking.

To be honest, I'm really happy with my mixes, and just recently have thought about getting something like the Waves SSL bundle or URS stuff now, instead of a Alan Smart C2 or whatever waaaaaaaaaay down the road.

I still have a Digi001 on OS9 with every plug known to man.......at least every plug in known to man about 6 or 7 years ago....and IMHO the free digirack plugs kill all of them. This is what initially made me think...maybe plug ins have actually come a long way in quality of sound and real world applications. BTW, not interested in moving platforms to gain PDC, I'de rather use LE without.




P.S. when I would mix in OS9, it was with my laptop (using Magma to hold the PCI card) with only 512mb of ram.....needless to say, I couldn't use but more than a couple plugs in real time, so it was pretty much always audio suite processing, so I never really had to deal with not having any PDC.

[aussie_techie]

most RTAS plug-ins dont cause a delay so most of time its not an issue. many waves plugs do have huge latency
the dly value PT gives is mainly for TDM systems and it doesnt always report correctly in LE. many plug-ins report a dly when in fact there isnt any. if you search the DUC you should be able to find a list of the plugs that do have latency and their values so you can compensate.

[Jenre]

What Aussie_techie said is right. Also, I tried the URS plugs on my LE system recently and they caused no delays for me. They sound great, too!

[nukmusic]

Originally Posted by aussie_techie

most RTAS plug-ins dont cause a delay so most of time its not an issue. many waves plugs do have huge latency
the dly value PT gives is mainly for TDM systems and it doesnt always report correctly in LE. many plug-ins report a dly when in fact there isnt any. if you search the DUC you should be able to find a list of the plugs that do have latency and their values so you can compensate.

right! I noticed this when I tried Guru in Protools. It reported 256ms of delay, but I can't hear it at all. so I check the other plugs and found the same thing.