It offers a dedicated input stage featuring crunchy pre-amp saturation and a brickwall safety limiter in the output stage. Everything is set up to work in zero latency and so be available for hassle free tracking and mixing. Two dedicated filters can be used in either the audio path or in the compressor’s sidechain which can be external as well. Thankfully, Cubase 10 now has a clever new feature in its mixer - a Latency Monitor option that can be switched on to show you precisely which plugins are causing latency, and how much of it. In this video from the FREE course Cubase 10 100: What's New In Cubase 10?, Joshua Carney shows you how it works, and how Cubase helps you to deal with.

Zero Latency Vst Plugins Plugin
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A VST output latency of 23.3 ms is simply unusable for live performance. The screenshot below shows the latency of my JDS Labs O2+ODAC, a popular DAC/headphone amp combo in the audiophile world. Even though this product wasn’t designed for pro audio work, it still performs much better than the MacBook Pro’s built-in sound card — 7.9 ms. Latency Delay is an auxiliary AAX, AudioUnit, and VST audio plugin which allows you to compensate latency produced by any audio plugins, instruments and processes which produce latency but do not.

A brief article on VSTi plugins, CPU usage and latency

In this article we look at CPU usage and plugin latency with focus on the composition and production phase prior to mixing.

What is latency?

Latency is a word describing the over all computation time the computer needs to process incoming signals before you hear it in the speakers.
It includes ASIO buffer size and plugin latency.

A modern DAW has latency compensation which means it tracks it in samples and delays everything according to the longest latency to keep the music in time.

The downside of latency compensation is that it can delay the output too much rendering recording instruments impossible.

VST plugins - Channel plugins

Channel insert plugins are VST and are processing incoming audio signals.

Zero latency is always preferable but not always possible. Zero latency means no additional latencies from the plugins you insert in the daw.
With a ASIO buffer size at 128 samples and 0 latency plugins it is possible to record real time while monitoring like you mix without the need of direct monitoring solutions.

Some good zero latency VST plugins

Most DAWs have zero latency basic plugins like eqs and compressors.

Here is some good 3. party zero latency plugins in VST format

ChannelStrips

SSL Duende ChannelStrip
Metric Halo ChannelStrip 3
Izotope Neutron 2 in 0 latency mode
Waves Scheps Omni

EQs

Fabfilter Pro Q2 and Pro Q3
SSL Xeq

Compressors

Waves CLA76
Waves API 2500

Limiters

Still Well Audio Event Horizon in clipping mode

Delays

Waves H-Delay

Instrument plugins

Instruments are plugins that generate sound based on input signals like midi.
We have tested CPU usage on some instrument plugins and here is the result.

Reaper CPU meter with processor usage and Plugin Delay Compensation

The image shows Reaper CPU meter with some synths ordered by use.
PDC is plugin delay compensation in samples. 0 means zero latency and 128 means 128 samples due to the fact that Reaper delays in ASIO buffer size chunks.

NI FM8

Native Instruments FM8 is an old processor light synth still worth using for its characteristic FM sound.

Kontakt Analog Dreams

The new Kontakt Analog Dreams synths are surprisingly heavy for what they are. Probably due to the new Kontakt 6 wavetable engine and better build in reverb.

Omnisphere 2

Omnisphere 2 is a sweet spot synth. A Versatile synth that sounds good with reasonable usage.

Zero Latency Vst Plugins Plugin

NI Massive

Like Omnisphere 2 Massive is a sweet spot synth regarding CPU usage and it is still at potent synthesizer.

Izotope Iris 2

Izotope Iris 2 is a nice synth with unique features but its time-stretching and spectral filtering algorithms are heavy. If you freeze the tracks it is quite a usable synths.

Massive X and Pigments

Massive X and Pigments are new synths and they are not that CPU heavy.
Some heavy ones not in this test are Serum, u-HE Diva and u-HE Repro.

A legend brought back due to popular demand! The secret weapon of many. TB Broadcast processor combines multi-band compression, multi-band stereo widening, automatic gain control, and peak limiting in one single, compact plugin.

The ideal tool to give your mixes that professional sound and an essential element in any podcast or broadcast production process.

TB EZQ combines machine learning, artificial intelligence and signal processing in a simple but powerful plug-in. TB EZQ is based on the work from Andrew Sabin and Bryan Pardo from the interactive audio lab at Northwestern University, IL, USA. They developed a method to automatically map common equalization manipulations involving multiple equalizer controls onto descriptive terms such as ‘warm’, ‘dark’ and ‘bright’. These descriptive labels can subsequently be placed onto a 2-dimensional space, in which each point represents a certain amount of ‘warmth’, ‘darkness’, and ‘brightness’.

With TB EZQ, common equalization tasks can be performed much more efficient than with common equalizers involving many controls and filter sections. It has zero latency and therefore works perfectly fine in any studio and live environment.

TB MidSide Transformer has the simplest user interface we've ever created, with only one switch: on/off.

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Simply put it on a track to transform the signal into a mid/side presentation. Flip another instance on the same track to transform back to left/right. No configuration needed; it will all work automatically! Use the MidSide transformer to allow other plugins to work in mid/side mode if they do not provide this often very useful functionality.

ToneBoosters Spectrogram shows a real-time spectrogram of the incoming audio signal! Visualize the audio signal, find hidden images, use it to find harmonic and temporal patterns easily.

ToneBoosters Spectrogram is fully resiable, comes with adjustments for sensitivity and color themes, and is available on Windows, macOS, and iOS.