Monitoring does not change the sound quality. You might be describing the effect of some comb filtering due to doubled signal, i.e. the signal coming back both through the DAW and Totalmix..

I think I know what you meant now. You mean I have the live sound from the hardware inputs and the software playback from my daw together? If thats that you mean, this is not happening. My hardware inputs are all the way down. I only have the software playback so I can monitor from the daw

This alone says nothing, the faders are down for which output ?
you have to click onto the headphone output and check again if the input faders are really down for the headphone and same for the monitor loudspeakers.

I checked for all hardware outputs individually so I know for a fact I have no hardware inputs open. They are all, all the way down for every output so I know for a fact I have no double signal. Basically all direct signal is 100% whitch off.

The Signal I get from monitoring is anyway different from the direct signal. Direct signal sounds the most natural of all.

But signal from daw sounds the best at 128 samples. higher than there is perceived latency and lower than that it sounds very thin, no body.

This is happening only when I monitor myself speaking from the microphone. The recorded result is of course clean. The sound coming from daw on playback is still not affected from buffer size and also when I play my midi keyboard (vsti) the sound is still not affected.

The only thing affected is the live sound I hear from the microphone on my headphones when of course I go through the daw. The direct sound is still not affected.

omg! All I needed to do is flipped the polarity switch!!!! you are the savior of mankind!

Pardon my ignorance, I have never try to monitor through DAW as I always went direct monitoring cause of latency! Recently I bought the raydat for one reason only to start monitoring through daw cause of the massively added flexibility so all this is new to me!

Thank you and thank you again so much!

Surprising that this would just so coincide to work with a simple flip, but good to hear (pun intended).

I once had a similar experience while testing a figure eight microphone. From the one side it sounded good, from the other it sounded thin.
Recording it and listening to it afterwards showed clearly that there was no difference.
Georg

2,9ms is a long time.

If you sing a tone of 1000Hz, one phase is 1ms long, shifting the audio 0,5ms can cancel out almost all the sound.
Shifting of 1ms will double the sound (1kHz tone).
Your 2,9ms will have a lot phasing issues.

Yep - you hear your own voice through the air, you hear your chest resonances through the air, you hear your vocal chords conducting through your bones and head/nasal cavity, AND you hear the latent sound in the headphones.  You basically get comb filtering - and depending on delay - this can end up with opposite polarity of the fundamental frequency wavelengths causing internal cancellation and the "thin" sound.  Flipping polarity simply allows the latent HP signal to combine more constructively with yourself - but it is still latent at those (and all) frequencies - just combines more favorably in your ear at the fundamentals.

You'd still have bone conduction and internal head/nasal resonances exciting the ear drum and nerves in your inner ear which you can't isolate externally or with ANC.

No, I am saying theoretically to better understand the nature of this phenomenon. Of course there is only one signal on my headphones so that's out.

My question is if I somehow had the best soundproofed headphones that literally soundproof my voice entirely from outside headphones then I shouldn't experience phase issues right? I am trying to understand if the phase issues are happening because basically the "2nd" signal of my voice is my real voice as it's coming out of my mouth

Oh I get it now! This is so interesting. When doing direct monitoring cause the latency is super low even with no soundproofed headphones at all the experience is still great but when going though daw then latency comes to play and phase issues become apparent. This actually solved the age long question I had maybe even 10 years ago that I didn't understand why going through daw the live sound is unnatural and basically the reason I bought an antelope Orion cause I could monitor direct with fx and reverbs and all and it's working great on that. But u all know the story with antelope drivers so I decided to buy a raydat to serve as my studio heart and connect antelope hardware through adats and suddenly I found myself back to situation I was in 10 years ago which I entirely forgot all this time!

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!

On a side note how do you guys track live vocals/instruments?

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

I do direct monitoring thru Totalmix and afterwards moving the recording manually to fit.
It can happen in the DAW the recording is not at the perfect place due to latency.

And don't forget to include plugin delays as they will easily double and quadruple RTL's if not choosing wisely (some can add thousands of samples of delay!).

Which I guess kinda explain why all those big star recording studios mostly record through those massive mixing consoles. Cause I guess phase cancellation is real kicker when it comes to artists. I was thinking of starting to monitor through daw and that's why I got the raydat cause of the really good low latencies but now I am learning this low latencies are just enough to cause the most horrible phase issues. Of course at the flip of the polarity switch everything sounds just normal again (but it's not really fully normal) so when I have to record a band that might open a new can of worms whereas before I never even have to think about that.

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?

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

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!