Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

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alexdingley
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Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by alexdingley » Thu Apr 15, 2021 7:41 am

On a bunch of the Antelope interfaces, going back a few years; they’ve had these fpga powered FX plug-ins, and they are cleverly implemented.

You can use them in the built-in digital mix environment, whether you want to give your headphone mix some reverb or if you want to compress /eq etc... the way these are implemented, you can insert them in the path before your DAW gets the signal... but there’s still a microscopic delay.

I just did a test late last night, and though I can’t recall exactly how many samples-offset the effected input was, it was ever so slightly behind the un-effected input.

My curiosity is: if I were to instance a bunch of these in drum inputs, am I setting myself up for phase nightmares? What size of delay is going to cause a phase cancelation problem?

Additionally... if I am able to determine that there’s a consistent amount of sample delay at certain sample rates, would it be appropriate to just nudge the effected tracks after recording? I’ve heard that nudging a track to compensate for mic-placement-induced phase issues isn’t a great idea, but if the dr kit was mic’d well and in phase, and then a digital plug-in causes a known-quantity of sample delay... would just nudging it forward be the right solve?

So partly I’m curious to hear from folks that Own one of these and track through the AFX plug-ins, but also... I suppose there’s a general practice question here... about the nudging idea.

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by digitaldrummer » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:03 am

as long as all of your inputs have the same plugins I wouldn't think it would put anything on the kit severely out of phase. Even a couple samples should not be detectable in most cases anyway. UAD has this same ability but tbh I've never checked to see if it changed the WAV file. My guess is probably since any processing has to take some amount of time.
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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by Magnetic Services » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:30 am

Those Antelope and UA plugins don't have delay compensation?

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by digitaldrummer » Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:45 am

they probably do have delay compensation, which is a different test than recording with the plugin and then again without the plugin.

If you want to check for delay comp you will need to record the same source (maybe a DI guitar through a splitter or something?) and record to one channel with and one channel without the plugin simultaneously.
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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by alexdingley » Thu Apr 15, 2021 12:59 pm

In my test, I was recording a Guitar through a DI into the Antelope, and using their Routing app to have one copy go through the plug-ins, while another identical copy was going straight through to the DAW... So it was a simultaneous test.

My question above really comes from the notion that I might NOT want to use the same plug-ins on every single drum channel. I might want to just throw something on kick/snare / overheads and/or maybe something else on toms, and then build a squash-mix in the onboard mixer to track some parallel compressed drums that get tracked with a massive 1176 emulation smashing them up. (minute phase issues maybe aren't as big an issue for my squash-track, but still... I'm curious if I'm creating a problem if I do it that way.)

I'm sure that the ultimate answer is gonna be "Go try it and see if it sounds good"... but I'm just doing my COVID-19 daydreaming process right now... as it'll be months before I have my band back in front of live mics for any recording.

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by digitaldrummer » Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:28 am

alexdingley wrote:
Thu Apr 15, 2021 12:59 pm
In my test, I was recording a Guitar through a DI into the Antelope, and using their Routing app to have one copy go through the plug-ins, while another identical copy was going straight through to the DAW... So it was a simultaneous test.
I don't know if that is truly simultaneous - I think any time you are using software for routing there may be some minimal sample latency, but I guess it depends on if the routing app is truly doing it in software, or manipulating the hardware.
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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by alexdingley » Fri Apr 16, 2021 8:44 pm

digitaldrummer wrote:
Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:28 am
I think any time you are using software for routing there may be some minimal sample latency
Good point — I'm gonna try another test to see if simply routing 2 copies (neither of which are routed through the AFX paths) of an input to two separate tracks of PT.

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by alexdingley » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:40 pm

Interestingly enough — I was just able to do a 4-track simultaneous test:

(in the antelope software control panel, you can route any ins to any outs (and apparently any number of times over and over)... so I took an input and just made sure it was hitting more than one destination.

1. Straight through
2. Straight through (but copied to a redundant DAW input)
3. Routed through AFX bus (with no effects applied)
4. Routed through AFX bus (with 1073 EQ / 1176 dynamics emulations)

The results were pretty cool. I did this at 24/96 with internal clocking, then had PT set to a 1024 sample buffer (but I repeated with a 128 sample buffer and it didn't change the results)

Image

So, duplicating an input caused no difference in timing between track 1 & track 2
Routing through the AFX bus at all added 2 samples of delay (at 96Khz)
Routing through the AFX bus with plug-ins applied (didn't matter if it was 1, 2, or 3 different effects stacked) caused a total of 10 samples of delay (at 96Khz).

So I guess that's tight enough that I shouldn't have any appreciable phase problems, right? — and if it's this predictable, I could always just notate which tracks are cut with AFX plug-ins applied, and nudge them 10-samples forward. As I get closer to tracking... I'll have to see if running multiple AFX plug-ins (meaning, multiple AFX paths) slows down the through audio any more. (like, if I'm lighting up all 16 AFX paths with 2 and 3 plug-in chains,... can I expect it to still be THIS tight, timing-wise?)

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by Nick Sevilla » Sat Apr 17, 2021 2:37 am

Most humanoids cannot tell flamming / phasing / delay issues until a few milliseconds. Typically above 8 mS if they are paying attention.

I've worked with some who can hear the weirdness at 6 milliseconds and longer.

At 44,100 6 mSec = 264.6 samples.

At 48 k 6 mSec = 288 samples

At 88,200 6 mSec = 529.2 samples

At 96 k 6 mSec = 576 samples.

So, in your example, 4 samples of delay between the original and the processed audio, is completely undetectable by a normal humanoid.
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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by vvv » Sat Apr 17, 2021 4:45 pm

bandcamp;
blog.
I mix with olive juice.

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by alexdingley » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:08 pm

vvv wrote:
Sat Apr 17, 2021 4:45 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-U-lzvhgo
...yes. Jazz.

Was this tracked/processed through an Antelope?

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Re: Antelope AFX users; do you track through these?

Post by vvv » Sat Apr 17, 2021 6:40 pm

Gotta ask Joe Sample.

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