Phantom power wont flow through the compressor to your mic, your mic has to be connected directly to whatever is phantom powering it. You will get signal when the bypass switch is on because that is effectively like taking the compressor out of the chain. Use your insert points for patching in the compressor.

nicko is right.

Besides, it is good practice to listen to the signal "from tape" when recording. The latency shouldn't be a problem, because it should be low anyway. That way you can be sure that what you' re listening to is the actual recorded signal.

Happy recordings!

Actually, latency is a bit of an issue with the MBox, I suppose because Digidesign went with USB instead of Firewire. Anyway, that's what the "mix" knob on the MBox is for. You can adjust it to hear a combination of the output of Protools along with your signal at the input of the MBox.

You may also need to try low latency mode in Protools, if the session has a lot of plugins active.

USB performance is very chipset dependent. I don't know about the mBox. Just ordered an mBox2 myself because I need to get used to working with PT(LE). Having not too many plugins running in your session while recording might also help. Anything below 9ms (total) should be workable.

you can change the latency by going in to set up then playback engine..and running at about 256 buffer size while recording you should be able to get almost unnoticeable latency. but if when you do ur mix ur gunna probably run at about 1024 buffer size.