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Hi! This comes from an indirect issue - I've just arrived at Cubase 5's land, coming from Nuendo 3.2. I was expecting a performance boost, as I was in the belief C5 would cope better with my Quadcore PC. Yet, this was not to be seen, my transferred projects use almost as much CPU power as they did in Nuendo (with the same plugins on, exception to a few CPU-friendly Dx's that C5 doesn't support).
I then turned my attention to smaple rate, to stress out this new Soft/HW combination. While I usually record at 48/24, I tested it at 88,2 and 96, pushing buffer size to a minimum of 64 samples, the lowest setting on my Delta 1010. It became clear this would not be a viable option, too many pops/clics. Setting buffer at 128 did improve things, but, nevertheless, it would not be my go-to setup. I've yet to do some more extensive testing (I was only recording one track inside a already populated project with several audio tracks converted to 88,2 and 96, VST'is, plugins, etc., real world conditions). But I began to suspect that, even with a 9300 Quadcore, I'm yet to beable to run my setup at the recording stage at 88,2 or 96 with the lowest buffer size, trouble-free. It is true that with increasing SR the latency for a given buffer size will decrease, and, at 96, running a buffer of 256 is ok, but... I guess we all try to squeeze out every bit of performance out of our gear.

At what ample rate / buffer size do you guys generally operate? Mind you, latency is a concern, and I'm referring to the recording stage, not the actual mixing, where you can set you buffers higher.

Thnks

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Big K Mon, 03/21/2011 - 08:23

I work with Nuendo since version 1.5, now 5.1, on RME hardware.
Recording with Cubase and Nuendo at lowest latency on a dualcore 2.4 GHz has been possible for years.
With a QuadCore and the latest RME driver I record multiple tracks with even more tracks playing back at 0.7 millisecs.
If there is a bottleneck in performance it is the Delta 1010 and its driver, harddrive or not enough RAM.
Just don't overdo it with plugs when recording. Those just need a certain calculation time, which can't be avoided, yet.

Standart recording settings are 44,1 / 88,2 kHz at 24 / 32 bit float with the RME card set to 0,7 ms / 3 ms.
Mixing at 12 to 23 millisecs. When I forget to change the settings the behaviour becomes a bit sluggish and I am
regularly amazed what the machine can sustain still set on 0,7 ms, before it shows.

TheJackAttack Mon, 03/21/2011 - 08:30

M-Audio generally does not write very good drivers. Extremely low latency is not a hallmark of them. The Delta series is quite old technology in regards audio but should work well enough. I'm guessing your computer needs a serious tweaking right off the bat. As Big K stated, an actual professional DAW computer should be able to handle what you're doing especially with a PCI interface.