Sometimes the awesome power and quality of today's digital recording tools add complexities that can confuse and frustrate you for far too many hours.

One of these puzzles can often be caused by latency problems.

So how can you diagnose and quickly solve [tag]latency[/tag] issues?…

First we need a standarised test signal. We use a program that plays a saw tooth wave sound, with no parameters adjusted. We feed this simultaneously to the different channels to be tested, and listen to the output.

Here's an example from a client case that came up a while back…

Out Of Time
A customer contacted us with this problem:

He was…

• mixing tracks from Cakewalk
• routing everything except his lead vocal track through an Aardvark Q10 (a bit long in the tooth now!)
• into his Mackie 1402-VLZ Pro
• His vocal track was routed via his PC's consumer-grade sound card

Problem: recorded vocals sounded delayed with respect to the backing tracks.

This seemed to defy common sense, since all the tracks began playback at precisely the same time.

What our customer didn't realize is that pro gear like the Aardvark Q10 has drivers and D/A converters that are much more efficient than the less-capable consumer sound card.

The result was that the vocal track took significantly longer to process, and added a noticeable delay at the output.

In addition to the delay factor, the [tag]recording[/tag] audio quality was nowhere near as good as the Q10's output.

The Solution?

In his case, since he had available channels, the solution was simple:

I advised him to route lead vocals through the Q10, instead of through the sound card!

Problem was history, client was happy, and all tracks were now in sync and sounding great!

The Moral of the Story?

Keep you signal paths of similar (professional) quality for consistent results.

Tags: How to Record, Music Recording