Logic Pro 8 Connecting Apogge Rosetta, symphony or lightpipe?

daveyboy

daveyboy

Logician
Connecting Apogee Rosetta, symphony or lightpipe?

I'm getting my Apogee Rosetta 800 tomorrow and plan on interfacing it with my system via lightpipe going into one of my motu 2408s. If I were to get the symphony card, etc, would I have better performance at low buffers (64) or is the only real benefit being able to record at a higher sample rate (88 and above)? I record at 64 buffer now and don't really have any issues but maybe I'm not pushing things yet. With the the motu hookup at the very worst I can record at a higher buffer and just monitor through cuemix. I guess I'm trying to decide of spending the $ for the symphony rig is worth it. Thanks for any help.
 
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Hi Dave,

Congrats on your purchase. There are a couple of advantages in using Symphony connectivity for your Rosetta 800 as opposed to connecting to via optical to your existing 2408.

As you mentioned, there will be a limitation in the sample rates using Optical: 8 channels at 48k, or 4 channels at 96k.

Another advantage, and more significant one in my opinion, is the near-zero latency performance delivered by Symphony. It is true that today's computers are fast enough to allow a considerable amount of DSP even at low buffers. The issue is that the buffer setting is not the only thing that causes latency in a digital audio workstation. One of the biggest offenders is the audio driver which commonly cause 6-8 ms of latency as the CPU plays "traffic cop" and holds up data in buffers. When you add the 1-2 ms average latency caused by AD/DA conversion, and then the latency caused by you buffer setting, the round trip latency you hear (for example, as a singer) thought your workstation is usually 8-10 ms with the lowest buffer settings. While that level of latency may be acceptable in some situations, it hardly leaves any room for increasing the buffer setting when you start hitting the CPU hard with processor intensive plug-ins.

The advantage of the Symphony driver is that is has root-level access the CPU allowing for an open lane for data in and out delivering a near-zero latency driver. Because of Symphony's near-zero latency driver the round trip analog to analog latency (with software monitoring on) is the lowest of any native workstation- 1.6 ms to be exact. This latency is so low that it meets the expectations of the most demanding low latency environments and also gives you a lot of room to increase your buffer setting when needed and still keep latency under the perceptible radar.

The good news is that you can enjoy the benefits of the best sounding conversion with Rosetta 800 immediately with your 2408 and have the option to upgrade your connectivity to Symphony in the future.

Feel free to call us is you would like to discuss this any further.

All the best,

Tony Cariddi
Apogee Electronics
 
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Thanks Tony! I actually did call (to discuss clocking). I'm curious as a "for example" in regards to having near zero latency what can my buffer be set to in Logic and still retain this? I can obviously use hardware monitoring with Motu's cuemix and put my buffer up high, but, I like using software monitoring as I sometime track direct guitar using an amp sim. Can for example set the buffer up to 512 in Logic and still have this low latency? thanks for the info.
 
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The buffer setting is the one place in your project where you can control your latency. Latency from all other areas is fixed, for example the latency caused by the driver is fixed.

The higher the buffer setting in Logic, or any DAW, the longer the latency. I don't know exactly what the measurement would be at a 512 buffer setting but you can be sure that it will be considerably lower than the latency you'd get using other I/O interfaces because our driver has the lowest latency by a large margin.

Best regards,

Tony Cariddi
Apogee Electronics
tony@apogeedigital.com
 
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Maybe someone who is using the system in Logic can chime in. I thought Apogee might have some info just because they make it and have used it. Right now using the motu driver I can track a vocal at 64 and no one complains about latency. What can I raise the buffer to using the symphony system and still have it feel like 64? Seems to be an easy question. Is it 128, 512, etc? Or, 64? Also, if it is 64 is there less of a hit on the computer cpu because the driver is better optimized and logic just runs better? Just trying to decide if spending the money would be worth it. Thanks for any real world info!
 
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I just did a live thing where the front guy wanted verb so I used software monitoring in low latency mode at 512 on my G5 PPC 2.6 and no issues.
Ted
 
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I have my gear setup at home to retrack vocals and some guitar and noticed that at 512 the guitar player complained about a little latency so i adjusted it to 256 and it was perfect. I even plugged my keyboard in to check it. No problem at 256. Thats the majic number for me and my setup. Now that is low latency mode with no plug ins on the master. I have about a 40 track session and there are one or two plugins on most tracks. You can't beat that.
Ted
 
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