Whats the difference between Record Enabled, Manual, Record Running and Tape Machine style monitoring in Cubase SX?
Monitoring in DAW software is the biggest cause of latency. This is why it’s important to note, when discussing monitoring, that avoiding monitoring while the software is in record mode is the ultimate goal to eliminate the latency issue almost entirely. In a nutshell, there is no latency when you record through an analog 24-track tape machine because the read and write heads of the tape machine don’t have a complex piece of software in the middle decoding and encoding audio files. When you add this layer of complexity, the time it takes to process the incoming audio (the signal you’re recording) means it arrives at the stereo output of your sequencer’s mixer a tiny bit later than the audio you’ve already printed, creating a tiny delay. This problem has been compensated for by a host of mathematics within the DAW, but it’s not entirely reliable–in fact, it’s downright wrong many times. Some sound cards support a new ASIO spec (ASIO 2.0), which patches the input signal directly to the
