• Registered: 2020-08-30
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Latency Dante VIA with Babyface and UC

Dear all
having read most of the Dante posts in this forum, it seems that latency and Dante was a problem of the past.

However, here is my challenge and maybe some outside the box thinking can help me:

My little basement studio consists of two rooms (10 m distance from each other, but given the architecture of the house 18m cable required).

One room is for recording loud stuff (Brass, Drums) and one is serving as a control room. So roughly this means up to six microphones from this room out and maybe three cues for headphones in.

How to connect them best? Analog mulitcore is not an option, as the required holes in the walls are just not bearable. Optical ADAT does not make the distance. USB cables neither. So I have started to try out Ethernet. I am on a budget but I had some spare equipment to start with

So I decided to connect the rooms as follows

A RME babyface and a fast desktop PC for Microphones and Headphone.
Connected via a gigabit switch to the control room PC (using an RME UC as audio device)
Dante Via and Dante Controller for routing.

DAW: RME UC, Cubase 10.5 with Dante VIA as a soundcard. Everything clocked to 48khz and 48 samples latency

Good news: It works.
Bad news: The true latency is killing me. According to Cubase it is 30ms (or roughly an 8th note at 120 bpm). So when I record, Cubase receives the recording just a little bit too late. SO I have to manually move the file on the timeline to sync playback and recording)

I have found very little advice on this, so I assume latency could be much lower, it is only my own dismal set-up that's wrong.

Here are my questions:

1. Is there a smarter way to use RME and DANTE Via for this (I cannot be the only person connecting two rooms with Dante)
2. Can Cubase itself accomodate? (There is a button called recording latency compensation)
3. Is there a smarter, better way to connect these two rooms? I tried VST Connect but this a different story (buggy software, disgruntled users in the forums etc.)

Thanks so much for any advice and ideas
Oliver

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2020-08-30 12:34:14)

  • ramses
  • DAW Mastermind
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  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 12,872

Re: Latency Dante VIA with Babyface and UC

Hi Oliver,

do you have a drawing of your setup please ? I have problems to understand the setup based on your description.
Would be beneficial if you could detail setup of the network between Dante components. Thanks.

While you deliver more information I want to use the time to brainstorm and show a different setup in contrast to that.

From the 1st glimpse a MADI based solution would have been fine:
- control room: either UFX+ or MADIface Pro
- recording room: Octamic XTC (MADI based), 2 phones outputs
    - nice integration into TM FX via "AUX device" feature
    - remote controllable by TM FX via "MIDI over MADI" feature, only 1 OM3/OM4 cable required, no further MIDI cabling needed

Its simple to build up a chain of MADI devices on one bus.
The distance (cable length) between two MADI devices may be 2km, up to 8 devices (8x8 =64ch) can be connected.
You have even full latency compensation when working with multiple devices in a larger setup.
This allows you even to connect a stereo Mic setup two 2 different XTC in the MADI chain.

The delay on the MADI bus at single speed would be only 3 samples per device. More information on this in chapter 10:
https://www.rme-audio.de/download/octamicxtc_d.pdf
https://www.rme-audio.de/download/octamicxtc_e.pdf

If you would choose UFX+, then you would even have the flexibility to use either USB3 or thunderbolt (which is external PCIe) towards PC or Apple, which would give you least latencies:

See here an excel sheet from a blog article which shows RTL for different RME solutions:

https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/index.php/Attachment/2343-UFX-UFX-RayDAT-Latencies-v2-jpg/

AFAIK with MADI its even possible to connect a 2nd PC with MADI recording interface like the MADIface Pro, so that you can make a backup recording of every audio track that goes via MADI.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Jeff
  • Jeff
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  • Registered: 2007-05-21
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Re: Latency Dante VIA with Babyface and UC

Dante Via is not suitable when low latency is needed.

Regards,
Jeff Petersen
Synthax Inc.

Jeff's Website

  • Registered: 2020-08-30
  • Posts: 2

Re: Latency Dante VIA with Babyface and UC

Dear all
thanks so much for all your input and your caluable comments. I solved the problem for 75 EUR. Here's my solution:

1. Dante VIA does not provide the latencies required without some hefty hardware invest. So how else can connect two rooms digitally /via LAN?

2. Some of you pointed me towards analog adio over lan transmitter. The cheapest one was from Thomann for 40 EUR
https://www.thomann.de/de/the_sssnake_c … gKUsfD_BwE

Now I was able to transmit two Channels to and from one room to the other

3. But: This box also transmits an AES signal.  Since my RME UC transmits and receives AES (it just takes an RCA to XLR cable) I can send and reive two channels auf digital audio.

4. In the other room I am using a RME BAbyface. Unfortunatly it only has an optical in/out. Enter Studiospares little box
https://www.studiospares.com/studiospar … 465760.htm. It converst Toslink to the AES format.

Outcome: I can send and receive 4 channels digital audio plus two analog signals between these two rooms. Which is enough for my purpose.
Thanks for your help

5 Reply by hselters (edited by hselters 2020-09-13 21:04:41)

  • Registered: 2018-12-21
  • Posts: 306

Re: Latency Dante VIA with Babyface and UC

Nice! You just saved 3k wink

Oliver_Berlin wrote:

Optical ADAT does not make the distance

If you need more channels I would try ADAT with a 20m cable, it might just work fine.
If not: There are also boxes for ADAT over LAN: Extreme Extender by Hear Technologies or Appsys ADX-8.