It wasn’t the only DSP solution, but it had the widest support in terms of plug-ins and general market penetration, and so was generally considered to be the only option for escaping the limitations of native processing… but at a price! Thankfully, the advent of high-speed external connection busses such as FireWire and USB 2 made it possible to incorporate a bit of DSP supercharging into a native-based DAW via an external ‘satellite’ DSP unit connected to one of these busses. As a result, dedicated DSP is lightning fast, and so can deliver imperceptibly low latencies, even when applying effects in real time.įor a long time, Pro Tools had the DSP-based DAW market sewn up. So it only turns its attention to handling audio inputs, outputs and processing every once in a while (many times a second in practice, but not constantly is the point).ĭedicated audio DSP, on the other hand, has just one job to do – handling audio mixing and processing – and can be fully optimised for this one task.
You see, relying on the host computer to do all of the processing required by a DAW is all well and good, but the computer is also running an operating system, drawing graphics, monitoring network ports, managing the file system and all the rest of it. There is a solution, though, and one that’s been around in one form or other for many years: Dedicated DSP. Direct monitoring gets rid of the latency of course, but at the cost of not being able to monitor the results of any processors or effects being applied in the DAW.
Good audio hardware and a powerful computer can get it down fairly low, but it’s still a persistent issue. Input-monitoring latency can be really frustrating.
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