12.25

DELAY COMPENSATION506
• Delay compensation can also be applied to combinations of the three examples above.
This could be, for example, if an Instrument device is routed in series via Effect devices to a Mix Channel device,
and the Mix Channel device has Effect devices in series in its Insert FX section. Then, the latency is summed for
all effect devices in the serial signal chain.
• Delay compensation can be applied to signals that are sent from the mixer channels to the Send FX busses.
This means that the signals from the Mix Channels are delay-compensated (if necessary) before they are sent to
the Send FX busses.
• Reason fully depends on getting latency values reported from the Effect devices/plugins.
In other words, Reason doesn’t measure any latency of the effect devices. However, you can manually adjust the
delay compensation if needed (if things sound wrong due to plugins reporting wrong latencies etc.). See “Manually
adjusting the latency values” for more details.
Delay Compensation limitations
• Only signals routed to a channel in Reason’s main mixer will be compensated. There is no delay compensation
for the channels on a rack mixer, such as Mixer 14:2.
• Only signals that pass the Master Section will be compensated (not channels connected using Direct Outs, see
“About using the Direct Out connections of the mixer channels”).
• The delay compensation ignores the latency reported by devices connected as Send Effects (see “About Send
FX Returns”).
• With some non-standard routings (splits, loopbacks, cross-routing etc), delay compensation may not work or
may be limited. See “Problematic configurations”.
• Effects inside an Instrument Combinator are not delay-compensated (but Effect Combis are).
• CV, MIDI and automation signals are not delay-compensated.
• MIDI Clock sync and Ableton Link are not delay-compensated.
However, you can manually adjust the MIDI Clock Sync Offset, see “External synchronization considerations”.
How the Delay Compensation works
Delay Compensation in individual mixer channels
As soon as you add an effect device/plugin as Insert FX in a Mix Channel or Audio Track device - or in the Master
Section device - the sum of the reported inherent latencies of the effect devices in that channel is displayed (in sam-
ples) at the bottom of the Insert FX section on the corresponding channel strip in the main mixer. If you add more ef-
fect devices in an Insert FX chain, the latency figures are added and summed to a total latency value, which is then
displayed in the respective Insert FX sections:
Latency values (in samples) displayed in the Insert FX sections on the main mixer channel strips.
q Hovering over any of these latency figures brings up a tool tip which also displays the latency in milliseconds.
What Reason then does to compensate for the inherent latencies in effect devices is to automatically add “invisible
delays” to the signals of the
other mixer channels. The goal for the delay compensation is to have all mixer channel
signals arriving at exactly the same time to the Master Section of the main mixer.