3 ms·
One issue with your standard phone or laptop audio output is that its clock is not overly precise. I learned this when I tried to combine the output of multipl
by Tade0 7y ago
One issue with your standard phone or laptop audio output is that its clock is not overly precise.
I learned this when I tried to combine the output of multiple sources generating a sawtooth wave from the same file - any two sources would sweep at around 1-2Hz.
It's still usable, just not in scenarios where you have many of them.
- yummypaint 7y agoThat's interesting. Were these two hardware outputs from the same audio device, or two different computers? It's true built in audio on most mobos is notoriously bad, and most musicians and podcasters use an external audio interface. I would imagine those don't suffer the same problems (plus they usually support higher bandwidth), though at that point the cost becomes non-negligible.
- Tade0 7y agoTwo different devices - phones, laptops. I didn't think of using an audio interface, since mine was, ahem, "consumer grade". Also I didn't have a second one to confirm that both have a good, steady sample rate.
- yummypaint 7y agoSome amount of relative drift in inevitable when the sources are independent, but yeah this suggests that the precision is only on the order of 1/48k. I cant imagine the hardware oscillator being that imprecise; crystals and mems are both better than 1/1M. I wonder if it's somehow software related. Ive seen some mysterious stuff with built in audio like variable input latency. if the output latency fluctuated similarly it might effectively introduce a low frequency modulation.