Input on dealing with delay between main output and headphones?
Back after a long stint away from this great forum, oh and mixing, and producing etc
Does anyone have any input on how to deal with or minimise the delay between the main output and the headphone cue on Traktor?
I’ve got an A10 hooked up to a DJM600 going into a Pioneer VSX-418 (No DSP - direct signal)
and the headphones’ output is about 1/8 ahead of the main output making it virtually impossible to cue anything.
This isn’t limited to traktor, my decks are hooked through the a10 and playing vinyl through it produces the same issue, surprisingly this doesn’t happen when they go straight into the mixer, leading me to believe the A10 has something going on.
So far I’ve messed about with latency/buffer (192/4ms is my sweetspot), setup shorter cables for the speakers and RCA from mixer to card and tried every setting i can think of in the amp.
A10 firmware is 48 (latest) and drivers are 3.1
I was hoping to find a DJTT video tackling this one but no luck
Borrow a friend’s A10 then try. If the same thing happens then you know it’s something with either Traktor or laptop.
If you don’t have a friend with A10, try using A10 & Traktor on another laptop.
Only thing that comes to my mind is maybe A10+Traktor are not set to “through” but “send-return”? Post your Traktor settings?
If you’re using an External mixer it is impossible for the A10 to cause a delay between Master and Headphone outputs. In External mode the Headphone output is generated by the mixer from the channel outputs, so as long as your channels are in sync that rules out any Traktor/computer/sound card issues.
The delay is almost guaranteed to be caused by the Pioneer VSX-418 in this situation. Connect a very simple speaker to either the Main or Booth output of the DJM to verify this.
Really appreciating the responses, hopefully we’ll get this put to bed and maybe get enough info together to make a bit of an article out of it.
@SlayForMoney I’m the only one I know who has an A10 at the mo, everyone else is on the Audio 8.
I’m going to have to call in a few favours to borrow a laptop from someone, the boys and girls are almost as possessive as me in that respect, but I’ll post any updates to this when I have them.
Very interested in “through” but “send-return” differences, I haven’t yet come across them in the Traktor Prefs, could you elaborate? I can post my tsi if that would help.
@Makar1 Normally I would agree with you, but that doesn’t explain why the Terratec card works just fine by comparison and so does routing the decks directly to the mixer. The only change to the system is the addition of the A10, speaker/amp/mixer/software remain the same.
I did a fair bit of troubleshooting last night, A10 in through mode using decks yields the same result, but the problem is gone once I take the audio 10 out of the equation and plug em back into the mixer.
The Terratec Also performs just fine, no delay at all. It’s only when the A10 is in that the issue appears, I recently updated the A10 firmware to 48, would this have a bearing on anything?
In the image, look at Deck B phase meter, thats how far I pull it back to sync headphones to output
For Example: Deck A is playing and Deck B I’m cueing. While I’m cueing it, it sounds a lot faster than whats playing so I tempo bend backwards to slow it down so that what I’m hearing in the phones matches up to what’s playing If I bring that in.
As you can see from the phase meter in the screenshot, it’s quite a bit slower. Thats how much delay there is between what I hear on the headphones and what is playing through the speakers.
I’ve never really bothered using the tempo master when mixing because from past experience (admittedly in Traktor DJ Studio days) whenever a track became master it shifted the tempo to it own bpm instead of syncing to whatever I had in the clock (usually 129 bpm).
Here’s my output routing:
External Mixing Mode
Deck A 3: CH A LEFT, 4: CH A RIGHT
Deck B 5: CH B LEFT, 6: CH B RIGHT
Deck C 7: CH C LEFT, 8: CH C RIGHT
Deck D 9: CH D LEFT, 10: CH D RIGHT
Output Preview
Nothing
OUTPUT FX RETURN (I use this for recording)
1: MAIN LEFT
2: MAIN RIGHT
I just tried playing the soundcard through internal mixing mode too, plugged phones into the soundcard to monitor, and its fine, I’m assuming that I should have the same delay given that the main output is still routed through Channel 1 of my mixer.
Just had a go at that, but it didn’t work that well for me. As a semi fix, I’ve just routed the mixer main out directly to the amp, this works quite well and only using rec out from mixer to main in for recording. Problem solved by the looks of it!
I’m thinking of writing this up after all the trouble shooting or getting it added to some routing faq if there is one.
yeah, that routing just didn’t make sense
for recording just plug booth/record out of the mixer into one of the inputs on the Audio via RCA cable and set recording to that input.
This might sound like a stupid question, but are you sure it’s not the latency from the speaker?
Sound waves (like a real wave), takes time to travel over a distance. The further the “output” speaker, the more latency you’ll notice.
This is why I do all my mixing “in-ear” with in-ear monitors. No need for a speaker right next to my head, and no excessive loss of hearing as a result.
Under different circumstances that would be the first thing I looked at, but at 3 feet? any latency would have been negligible, turns out I was just being an idiot with my routing.
