at this point the best way forward is you must now write down for us what exactly you will want to do with the setup - think of all the possible job's you want to do and list them.
quote
Even before I received my review unit, several SOS readers had asked me to investigate the Hercules' zero-latency monitoring, and I can see why. Unlike most Control Panel utilities, the Hercules' has no level meters, and indeed the unit itself has no onboard DSP mixer for monitoring purposes, in contrast to interfaces from the likes of Echo, Emu, M Audio and Terratec. Instead, you can choose a single input channel pair to be routed to hardware outputs 1/2 with 'zero' latency (the actual latency value is that of the converters, plus that set by the buffer size in the Audio Transfer page, which defaults to 1ms but can be dropped to 0.5ms).
This two-input limitation probably won't bother those recording racks of synths, while those recording with more than two mics will need additional preamps anyway, and may therefore require a small mixer and be able to use that for monitoring purposes. However, if you intend to record more than two simultaneous inputs and need to monitor them simultaneously through your computer, you'll need to disable hardware monitoring and rely on the higher-latency path through your DAW's buffers.
regarding the sos thing, dont worry too much about that, when eh says higher-latency path, it'sa not really noticeable, it's just that for thru-the-hardware monitoring 'direct thru', it can only do that with one pair of input channels, but trust, that's not a problem, if your pc is decently quick you'll be able to monitor thru the s/w DAW at latencies which will be negligable.
See, lets say you want to record a band.. drums, bass, 2 guitars... 8 mic's.... you'll then dub extra guitars layers & motifs, vocals, BV's and odd bits and mix
ok, so tbh, i personaly dont use s/w insert type fx on recording, because there is now (not like in tape days) alot of dynamic range to play wth, so gating & compressing i do afterwards on mix personaly, it doesnt make any difference to how 'separate drums sound with gates for example, and there's enuff dynmaic range for me peronaly to just set levels with room to spare for peaks and compress afterwards.
so that leaves additive fx for monitoring... reverbs, delays, etc... well they are additive fx and are 'added' in to the original signal. Reverb and dleay fx by teh bature of what they are (reflections returning) are by their nature delayed anyways, so any latency ( a few MS) added with 'Thru The Software' monitoring as opposed to 'Direct thru - zero latency monitoring' is ok cos time fx are slightly behind the original anyways... in practice, adding reverb to a vocal and singing with mebbe 5-7 MS doesnt sound odd
anyways dont worry about it in terms of recording a band
The main thing is to define the jobs you wanna do. so you can evaluate what the unit CAN do in terns of your needs
___________________________________
I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!