User`s guide
APOGEE ELECTRONICS
Ensemble – User’s Guide
23
Maestro 2
Maestro Low Latency mixing
While recording, if you notice a delay between the moment you play or sing a note and when you hear it in your
headphones you are experiencing latency. Maestro’s low latency mixer may help and can be congured by clicking
the Mixer tab in Maestro.
A bit of background information concerning latency and computer-based digital recording setups will help you better
understand these functions. When recording with most computer-based digital audio applications, the delay between
the input and output of the recording system often disturbs the timing of the musicians performing. This delay
, known
as latency, means that the musician hears the notes played a few milliseconds after having actually played them.
As anyone who has spoken on a phone call with echo knows, relatively short delays can confuse the timing of any
conversation, spoken or musical.
To illustrate the effect of latency, gure A depicts the typical signal path of a vocal overdub session. A vocalist sings
into a microphone, which is routed to an analog to digital converter then to the audio software application for record-
ing. In the software application, the vocalist’s live signal is mixed with the playback of previously recorded tracks,
routed to a digital to analog converter, and nally to the vocalist’s headphones. A slight delay accumulates at each
conversion stage, while a much greater amount of delay occurs through the software application, resulting in the
vocalist hearing his performance in headphones delayed by several milliseconds.
By routing the hardware input directly to the hardware output and mixing in playback as shown in Figure B, it’s pos-
sible to provide the vocalist a headphone monitoring signal with a much shorter delay.
First, the signal being recorded (in this case, a vocal mic) is split just after the A/D stage and routed to both the soft-
ware application for recording and directly back to the hardware outputs without going through the latency-inducing
software. This creates a low latency path from mic to headphones. Next, a stereo mix of playback tracks is routed to
the low latency mixer and combined with the hardware input(s). This allows the performer to hear himself while listen-
ing to playback tracks without a confusing delay in order to comfortably record overdubs.
Note that the software application’s mixer is used to set a stereo mix of playback tracks while the low latency mixer is
used to set the balance between the stereo playback mix and the hardware inputs.