You can of course use direct monitoring and fx like reverb and delay from the DAW. You can of course not use direct monitoring and compression or eq from the daw. Reverb and delay are just not as latency sensitive.

Finally I ended up back to direct monitoring but this time with a twist. As I have both Orion studio and raydat I have two options which both utilize the amazing routing of total mix and super flexibility of Orion studio. As totalmix can can route all individual input to all outputs separately this gives me the option to take all 12 hardware outputs of Orion (8 line outputs and 2 stereo HP outputs) and create 6 live headphones mixes and also route hardware reverb from Orion to all of those for live monitoring. Also in this setup as I have 16 adat inputs I could if I wanted if I didn't utilize them all, I could send some of them to the afx section of Orion for real time effects compression/eq and other stuff. So in my daw I would record the clean preamp but the singer will listen another output with fx and reverbs.

Or option two if wanted to route all 16 outputs to afx section of Orion then I could switch my daw to use Orion for recording and record straight from Orion but the band would hear the headphone mixes from raydat. The drawback from this is that I would lose one headphone mix cause I would need a way to send audio from daw to the headphones.

Either way both options are good as for me it's of the utmost importance the artist to get the most natural sound possible to their headphones.

Before raydat, I could still do up to 4 mixes but it was horrible doing them through Orion panel as there was no way of controlling it externally but now with raydat I can do up to 6 and totalmix works beautifully with Mackie protocol so I can control it with my icon controller which makes it a breeze and so fun!

The fact that a polarity flip simply fixes the issue here is a coincidence. There's no law that says monitoring through the DAW is somehow polarity reversed for any given signal, unless something is incorrectly configured in the input signal path. You will find it also depends on pitch and the latency you've set. If regardless of any of these factors, the flip will always fix the issue, check the signal path.

Yeah I know what you mean, in my case polarity "fixed" it cause it just so happen to get comb filtering at those frequencies with that certain latency. And of course it never fully fixes it cause comb filtering is a big complication, but it just makes it sound more natural as it affects other frequencies that are not as important to me. The best sound is of course and always will be direct monitoring

I might be wrong though, and I just let it frighten me cause I never really recorded professionally before through daw monitoring it was always direct.

What do u guys think about that?

Are u going though daw and phase flip whenever needed or doing direct monitoring?

I am using TM FX for monitoring.

I have some use cases like recording guitar through VSTi where I have a little unavoidable delay
which needs an ASIO buffer size which delivers less than 14ms latency (32..256 at single-speed).

Latencies <= 10 ms feel more comfortably for me to play, but up to 13,5ms is still possible.
So I could also use buffer sizes of 256 samples and still play.
With higher latencies, you immediately slow down, impossible to play and hold tempo.

Here are some latency values and the equivalent of distance between 2 musicians on stage.
Recording interface: UFX III at 44.1 kHz sample rate.
Sound travels through air at approximately 343 m/s at 20°C.

Buffersize     RTL     Distance
[samples]     [ms]       [m]
32                 2,993       1,03
64                 4,444       1,52
128               7,347       2,52
256             13,152       4,51
512             24,762       8,49
1024           47,982     16,46
2048           94,422     32,39

You can see here .. for pure recording you use normally higher ASIO buffersizes for more stability
to compensate any potential issues with your computer during recording.

ASIO buffersizes >= 512 up to 2048 samles would cause too much delay for monitoring.

So monitoring over TM FX makes in all cases most sense.

I'm not a singer (be glad lol) - but I will often ask the singer(s) if normal or inverted polarity sounds best to them in the cans...

One caution on monitoring through the DAW - Be CAREFUL with high-latency plug-ins.  You have 2 choices with them - use them with PDC on and maintain aligned sound but with a butt-load of latency, or disable PDC and have a temporary alignment mess on your hands.  Or better - substitute a low-latency/zero-latency version of a Plugin for tracking, and revert to the higher latency Plug-in at mix stage.  This caught me off-guard once when I inserted a plug-in I was not aware had so much latency - and the Drummer casually mentioned he was having a delay in his headphones (this was AFTER a few takes lol).  I sat down on the kit, put on the cans, and had egg on my face!  Removed the problematic plug-in, and back to low-RTL wet monitoring heaven!

Are u going though daw and phase flip whenever needed or doing direct monitoring?

But at least this time finally I understand what is happening! it might seem like obvious knowledge to some of you but unfortunately it wasn't for me.

Anyway so glad again u guys could help with your experience and knowledge!