Guitar, effects, monitoring output

guyshomenet - I'm replying because I've felt your pain. I came up with an answer that works great for me, and I'm sure others will chime in with their rebuttal or their personal tips. I probably am replying with what others might suggest is heresy.

The upshot of my reply is that I hear essentially zero latency when recording live tracking (recording) when I have the guitar loaded with amp sim effects. Sounds like it's coming from a real amp. Same for vocals, no delay even with effects and reverb etc. while recording.

I have an audio interface for all kinds of mixing and wide ranging inputs. But I put that aside when I'm tracking (recording) electric guitar, or using microphones for vocals or acoustic guitar.

Anyway, this particular device works for me and I couldn't be happier.

Links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwBR1OfHRtM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRpCXWSC8TE

I use a Lexicon Lambda and GR5 amp sim to record guitar tracks. If I don't have a lot of tracks, it's no problem setting the Lambda ASIO driver down around 9ms, which allows me to monitor through GR5 without noticeable latency. With more tracks, you can follow Craig's suggestion and freeze some.
Sometimes it's more convenient to press the FX bypass button on the control bar, but you can only hear the direct guitar signal when you do that.
When I've finished recording, I turn off the input echo and set the ASIO driver up at ~65ms for smooth playback with all FX and tracks back on.

lawajava

Anyway, this particular device works for me and I couldn't be happier.

Line 6 uses what they call "Tone Direct" technology which indeed gets extremely low latency because they're basically bypassing all the layers most interfaces go through. The tradeoff, though, is you're committed to recording whatever sound you've dialed up with their POD software. Of course you can record a pretty dry sound and re-amp it later...but if you're going to do that, you can just use zero-latency monitoring. Still, Line 6 came up with a viable latency solution at a time when computers often weren't up to the task. I still have my KB37 :)
 
Some people considered this a disadvantage but I think there's value to committing to a sound. Although I use amp sims all the time, it's rarely for the ability to change sounds in midstream; I use them to create sounds I can't get in the physical world. If I recorded a song with an AC30-type amp feeding three parallel cabinets, that's almost certainly not going to change into a Marshall stack.
 
As to the original question, yikes - USB 1.1 is definitely going to have latency issues. That's very slow technology. Okay for a couple tracks, but push it any harder, and the latency goes through the roof.
 
 

I owned a UA Apollo a month ago and I’m pretty excited. You can set the buffer to any size you need to run the project without drop outs and don’t have to worry about latency when you play thru the UAD effects on the internal UAD-2. So you don’t’ have to mix down any track and can even add some guitars while you’re in the mixing process. The downside of the Apollo is that isn’t a cheap interface and you can only use the UAD-Plug-Ins while tracking. There are not so much amp sims available now and they are expensive too. The Apollo comes with the Softube Amp room Half-Stack, which is only the Marshall sim from the Vintage Amp Room Bundle. The Vintage Amp Room Bundle is not my favourite, but it’s ok for tracking and it provides a wide range of sounds. By adding reverb, delay and/or chorus I almost get a sound I’m comfortable with, what I think is the most important thing. I only record the clean guitar signal a do the reamping afterwards in the mix.
 
Before I bought the Apollo I’ve done guitar recording as mentioned before, by remixing and archiving tracks to get the latency low. That also worked very well for me. Now with the Apollo I can concentrate more on music that on latency ;).

My apologies for not replying sooner. A family crisis pushed everything aside for a while.
 
Adjusting the latency did the trick. Avoiding the long story as to why I didn't try that first, once I got into the ASIO Panel, it reported the round trip latency to be 72.2ms. So as a test I dropped it down to 10ms each way (20ms total). The echo latency was so small that it doesn't bother me at all. I suspect I could crank it down more, for now I can get by.
 
The old Omega seems to do OK, all things considered. I suspect I have a later model using USB 2.0 (IIRC, it was advertised as such when I bought it). No argument that I need to upgrade gear, but that will have to wait. Likely do so when I migrate to a much newer laptop (this old beast is still using DDR2 memory on a 800mhz bus).
 
Per sub threads: I'm in agreement about using POD and other outboard gear for my projects. I like broad experimentation, and using soft stacks for amp/cabinet modeling allows me a lot of latitude when chasing a sound. I admire Line 6 equipment, but prefer the variability I get with even simple tools like Revalver.