On 3/8/2019 6:08 PM, geoff wrote:
Surely there is an ASIO driver for the interface, which presents
directly toÂ* the DAW of choice, without the likes of a mixer applet.
Of course there's an ASIO driver. Usually with interfaces like this (and
it's the case with your Focusrite) the control panel software for the
hardware DSP mixer gets installed along with the ASIO driver. You can
use it or not.
But low latency input monitoring is also available to the normal output
channels as well or instead.
What does this mean? What "normal output channels?"
Most DAWs offer the option of input monitoring, so, yeah, you can do it
in the DAW, and send it back to the interface so you can hear it in
whatever you have connected to the interface for monitoring - speakers
or headphones or both. The thing is that this takes longer than sending
the input signal through the interface's built-in mixer and to the
monitor output.
By taking advantage of the hardware mixer, you can use large buffers and
eliminate glitches and dropouts and have lower monitor latency than
you'd get even with buffers reduced to the smallest size that still
allows the DAW program to work. It's almost as good as using a hardware
mixer.
Unfortunately, most people recording today have only used a DAW and
don't bother to understand signal flow, so they assume that the 6 to 10
milliseconds of monitor latency that they get using the default buffer
size is just the way it is. Or they aren't perceptive enough to
recognize that there's something that can be improved, or they aren't
recording things were latency matters.
Hearing your guitar in the headphones two or three milliseconds after
you pick a note isn't going to throw off your playing, but hearing your
snare drum flamming in the headphones might be distracting, and hearing
your voice "equalized" with a comb filter is really bothersome to some
singers.
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