Monitor engineer Brian Bavido has been out with Dashboard Confessional, Art Garfunkel, Lisa Loeb, Richard Marx and “100 other bands that you’ve never heard of.”
Latency in digital consoles, in regards to inserting analog equipment, is still a problem that’s overlooked by many engineers. As much as we like to stay in our digital “dream world,” there are certain artists that simply require you to use many of the old standbys in the analog domain. Front-of-house engineers don’t often hear the latency issues in the P.A., but when you’re mixing in-ears, the phase issues caused by the delay are incredibly detrimental to the artist’s mix. An example of this would be an outboard compressor inserted on the lead singer’s vocal mic via D/A and A/D converters. This throws not only his voice but also all the bleed from the band slightly out of time/phase with the rest of the signal in their mix. To solve this issue on certain boards, simply use an external preamp into the desired compressor and return the signal to the board’s insert return. This bypasses the D/A conversion point where most of your latency occurs.
