On Sun, 14 Feb 2016 13:37:03 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote: >On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 07:37:08PM -0600, Daniel Sheeler wrote: > >> What does it mean for a soundcard to provide hardware monitoring? >> And when you monitor a recording, don't you want to hear a signal >> coming from the DAW instead of bypassing it or something? I'm just >> generally confused about what is meant by HW monitoring :D. > >It means that the input signal of the soundcard (which goes to >the new track you are recording) is also added to the soundcard's >output signal (the previous tracks) without having to pass via >the PC, i.e. without any delay. It's the normal way to monitor >a new track when recording via a mixer, but many sound cards, >even simple ones, can do this as well. Doing it this way latency doesn't matter. I suspect that several users experience issues, since they can not do it this way, because they need to play a virtual synth during recording or because they need virtual effects during recording, IOW hardware monitoring by the sound card or by a mixing console can't be used. That is one of my arguments why a "studio in the box" is _not equal to_, _let alone better than_ a studio with external gear. One other issue could be caused by chains of digital gear, they might have digital connections, but then sync could be tricky, or much more common for home studios, they all have their own analog ins and outs and inaudible latency of one device becomes a serious issue as soon as it's the sum of three devices, each with an inaudible latency, but all together with a much too long latency. To replace components or to buy analog replica or second-hand devices of old analog gear often is much more expensive, than buying digital emulations of those devices. The reason for this is not mistaken belief that real analog vintage devices are better, it's the sum of all features of vintage devices, compared to virtual digital devices/computer software that makes vintage devices de facto better. One advantage of such external gear is that even if the digital recording machine has got a very long latency, it doesn't matter, since by using hardware monitoring, there is no latency. You could apply what ever external effect you want while recording, with or without recording the effect and there is no latency and you do not need to care about how good your computer hardware is, simply use that much latency as needed to get no xruns. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
