Audition headphone / audio monitoring?

Question

Hey folks,
I'm curious if Adobe Audition has any easy way to set up headphone audio monitoring? A basic audio passthrough? Basically, so i can hear the levels at the same time i am recording or speaking through the microphone in a pair of headphones. I have a feeling this might be a more complicated question than it seems, because I'm using a USB microphone (Blue Microphones' Spark XLR), so i'm imagining maybe there is hardware latency issues with using USB?
Thanks a lot for your time!
-Quin

Answer 1

Audition doesn't do any monitoring setup at all - that's down to the software controller for your audio device, although it's possible to send a channel output from Audition's mixer in multitrack mode directly to an output. That will give you a round trip through Audition, and include any effects you've put in the channel -  but it will only be the dry signal that gets recorded.
To do this, you need to find out in Audition's hardware preferences whether there's an output available, and then you have to select to use it in the channel preferences. Yes it will increase latency - probably enough to put you off doing it if you don't have a seriously fast machine. There's no particular latency issue with USB connections - by and large this is all down to the processing in the machine, which has to take your signal, pass it through Audition, and then send it back to the audio driver. That's what takes the time. The really bad news is that this is really only going to work properly with ASIO drivers (minimum latency), and I'm assuming that this is a USB mic. If so, Blue don't appear to have produced any ASIO drivers at all for it. But it's not clear from your original post because you refer to an XLR mic. How is it connected to the PC?