When I record my bass in Cubase SL, and listen to the signal live, I get this small amount of latency. It almost sound like I have applied reverb to it, but when I listen to the recordings they seem pretty synchronised with the rest of the music. Is it possible that the delay is only in the Cubase monitor, and does not really affect my recordings? I hope this made sense.
It is completely possible for there to be latency in monitoring and not in playback. Remember when you are monitoring a live signal you computer is doing two digital-analog conversion (one on the input side, to record the signal, and one on the output side to send that ksignal to the monitor). That takes CPU and memory resources and can cause the output conversion to be slightly delayed compared to the rest of the track. When you are playing back direct from disk you only have 1 D-A converison happening. Increasing your sound card I/O buffer size and make sure you are running the most up to date WDM or ASIO drivers possible can remove or reduce latency. Depending on what kind of sound card you have you might be able to use direct monitoring, where the monitor signal si sent direct from the soundc ar instead of through the PC. This will give you a 0 latency signal on the monitors at the expense of not hearing any plug ins or effects applied in the software.
The current driver that comes with my M-Audio Ozone soundcard does not work on my system. I get unwanted noises, and crashes occur as soon I add plug ins. Therefore I have to use the Asio4all driver. When I use the direct monitoring settings on my soundcard there is no latency at all. At least itÂ’s nothing that my ears can detect. The latency is only there when I use the monitor option in Cubase SL; but I can live with that, as long its not actual recorded stuff that gets delayed. Thanks!
I had the same problem using Cubase SX. It really taxes my laptop. What eventually worked for me was going "external" for my monitoring via the PreSonus Inspire.