[Mike Rivers]

philicorda wrote:

I think I have made this more confusing than it actually is.

When the Firestudio ADAT connections are used as 16 channels at 44.1KHz,
channels 9-16 cannot be routed, or monitored with 'zero' latency in the
Firecontrol mixer. They only connect directly to the DAW software.

How do you find all of this out? Do you have to buy one? I tried to dope
that out from the manual and couldn't. And it would be nice if there was
a block diagram. But you know how concerned they are about the
competitors finding out what they're really making.

I though it worth mentioning as the Firestudio is advertised as having 26
inputs, but 8 of them cannot go to the 'zero' latency headphone mixes or
be routed between i/o ports. This is annoying if you are using it as a
portable rig without a desk, as it means 8 input channels have a
different monitoring latency to the others, and you can't easily solo
them.

I of course haven't checked out everything, but I don't think I've ever
had a multichannel audio interface here with "no latency" monitoring
features that didn't have some sort of gotcha or other. I get the
impression that the people who design these things have just never
worked with a recording console that they're attempting to emulate.

First, there's "zero" latency, for large values of zero. They don't want
to spend the money on actual analog switching (or risk the loss of a
couple of dB of noise floor) so all the monitoring goes through A/D and
D/A conversion, with its associated delay. Yeah, it only represents
standing a foot or two away from the monitor, so who cares? But when
you're speaking or singing, it's like lengthing your throat by a foot or
two and that's a comb filter right in the middle of the vocal region of
the audio spectrum. And how about a Talkback that can't be assigned to
any output other than the headphone jacks on the front panel? If you can
reach the headphone jack and the talkback button, you don't need either
the headphones or the talkback, or both.


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