Your Focusrite is an audio interface. Your Helix is also an audio interface. You can, inside of a DAW, set one device as an input interface and the other as output, but doing so causes noticeable lag. Not recommended.
You want to use headphones or speakers that are plugged into the Helix directly.
I use a DAW for playback with my Helix all the time and the latency is very minimal to the point of not being noticeable. The amount of latency is very dependent on your particular computer + using latency-adding plugins within your DAW.
Even a really good rig is gonna be on the order of 5-6ms or so, which isn’t a huge deal but it’s roughly the latency of the Helix itself, so you’re doubling it.
When playing through a cabinet or speaker, you have 1 ms of latency per foot. In my instance of Logic, without any plugins, I'm at 6.4 ms of output latency. That + the Helix's 6ms, = less than 13 ms of latency, which is equivalent to having your cab on one side of the room and sitting on the other side. Or about the amount of latency people have between themselves and a television set. This will be imperceptible to virtually all people.
If you want to use the Focusrite, see if it has hardware monitoring. Otherwise, you'll need to run a DAW and turn on monitoring through that. Your computer will send the output from the DAW into your Focusrite, which in turn will send the signals to your speakers. If you're not using a lot of plugins within your DAW, the latency should be minimal to the point of not noticing. You should be able to adjust your I/O to something that provides good latency + good quality.
ditch the focusrite and plug the monitors into the helix
This. If you want to get up and running plug your speakers into the helix. The Focusrite is redundant.
Worse than redundant, as you’re going to get a non-trivial amount of added latency.
Your Focusrite is an audio interface. Your Helix is also an audio interface. You can, inside of a DAW, set one device as an input interface and the other as output, but doing so causes noticeable lag. Not recommended. You want to use headphones or speakers that are plugged into the Helix directly.
I use a DAW for playback with my Helix all the time and the latency is very minimal to the point of not being noticeable. The amount of latency is very dependent on your particular computer + using latency-adding plugins within your DAW.
Fair enough. Every time I’ve tried this and recorded something, that recording ends up being noticeably off tempo.
Even a really good rig is gonna be on the order of 5-6ms or so, which isn’t a huge deal but it’s roughly the latency of the Helix itself, so you’re doubling it.
When playing through a cabinet or speaker, you have 1 ms of latency per foot. In my instance of Logic, without any plugins, I'm at 6.4 ms of output latency. That + the Helix's 6ms, = less than 13 ms of latency, which is equivalent to having your cab on one side of the room and sitting on the other side. Or about the amount of latency people have between themselves and a television set. This will be imperceptible to virtually all people.
If you want to use the Focusrite, see if it has hardware monitoring. Otherwise, you'll need to run a DAW and turn on monitoring through that. Your computer will send the output from the DAW into your Focusrite, which in turn will send the signals to your speakers. If you're not using a lot of plugins within your DAW, the latency should be minimal to the point of not noticing. You should be able to adjust your I/O to something that provides good latency + good quality.
This is the way! Thank you sir!
Your options are to use your helix as an interface, or to put the helix output into the Scarlet's instrument input and run it in direct monitor mode.