Is the Roland Aira VT-3 loopback a broken feature?

All of the coverage of the Roland Aira VT-3 says that is has a "USB audio loop-back" and many reviews have praised the feature. Before I bought the VT-3 I checked with suppliers what the loopback did and they said it allowed an audio track from your DAW to be sent to the VT-3, processed via the VT-3 vocal effects, and returned to the DAW. That's what you'd expect a loopback to do.



The VT-3 manual describes the loopback as follows: "The sound played back by your computer is mixed on the VT-3 with the sound of the mic, and returned to the computer. The sound is also output from the VT-3’s OUT jacks and PHONES jack." Having played with the VT-3, it seems like this is simply a mix. The sound from the computer is not processed in any way, just the dry computer sound and the new mic input are combined.



This makes the loopback useless! The purpose of a loopback, surely, is to be able to process sound either live (via the mic) or offline (via the loopback). For example, if you record a vocal track and want to replay the dry recording and edit the VT-3 settings to recapture the VT-3 performance.



Has anyone else been able to get the loopback to work as expected or is it a broken feature?

Is the Roland Aira VT-3 loopback a broken feature?