Thanks for all the replies. My Dad just prefers mixing and applying effects on the desk – everything is recorded dry into the DAW with the faders and panning set at zero and processed as it comes back to the desk, with the exception of the Steven Slate tape plug-in. The PC is mainly for the hundreds of VST instruments he has, if he could afford £100k of outboard gear he’d do that instead.
The key issue with the latency is playing the VST instruments. There is always going to be a slight delay between pressing a key on the keyboard to hearing the sound, and the quality of the ASIO drivers is vital for ensuring this is as low as possible, especially when running 5 or 6 heavy-duty instruments such as BFD, Slate 4, New York Pianos etc at a time.
Obviously the lower the buffer you can achieve just playing back say 32 tracks of audio (I’ve had USB interfaces before that struggled with a few tracks of audio at anything less than 1024 samples, much worse than the on-board audio with ASIO4All drivers), the lower you can get away with once you’ve added a load of VST instruments.
I can just about work with a buffer of 1024 samples, but my Dad struggles to adjust to anything larger than 512. It’s not something you can take a £2,500 gamble on. At the moment he has an RME Hammerfall ADAT interface with 24 tracks in/out which is rock solid, so anything less than that level of performance would be a disappointment for the sake of upgrading the mixer and getting more physical faders.
