5 ms·

The threshold is more like 3ms in my experience. When tracking vocals with headphones (no acoustic latency) anything higher will start feeling weird. This is al

by bhj 6y ago

The threshold is more like 3ms in my experience. When tracking vocals with headphones (no acoustic latency) anything higher will start feeling weird. This is also why Thunderbolt is preferred over USB for recording; you can get in and out of the CPU with effects much faster.

saurik 6y ago
3ms by sound is only 3.36ft away.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Distance from the source of sound is actually very important in live performances. There have been some empirical studies on it, but it’s still something people often get rather opinionated about. There is a reason though that a small ensemble can play to the beat of something like a drum, but a large ensemble like an orchestra can’t. There’s plenty of writing about how orchestras lag behind conductors and how different sections of orchestras have to take their timing queues differently depending on where they’re situated. 10ms is what I was always told was the generally accepted threshold after which a musician start to experience increased difficulty as a result of the latency. Which largely aligns with my own experience with audio latency. From there the difficulty just keeps increasing, and the performance quality keeps degrading until at some point the musicians and the audience gives up.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Thanks for writing this. I made the exact same point in another subthread, that 10ms is enough to mess with your brain. My only experience of it is when the audio and the visual out of sync by only about 10ms while watching something (I forget what). I can't watch anything like that for any real length of time, and I'm not even trying to play along.
    - saurik 6y ago
      10ms by light is 1862.824 miles away (which is approximately the distance from Los Angeles to Chicago). I honestly just don't think you are truly appreciating that light is almost a million times faster than sound.
      - AmericanChopper 6y ago
        The refractive index of single model fiber is ~1.5. So 10ms of fiber transit is closer to 1250 miles. The fact that no two real world internet users are connected by a straight line of fiber optic cabling is going to bring that in even further. If you were relying on round trip latency for some reason, that would cut the distance in half. And that’s just for an idealized communication network. A real world use case would have a lot more latency introduced by routing/switching, and all of the typical quality issues you’d expect from ISPs. I used to live within line of sight of the data centre that hosted an online video game that I played, and the lower bound of my ping was about 15ms, it was usually in the 20s. Those factors are why something like this is unlikely to ever provide a high quality experience over even relatively short distances. I’ve just always found it interesting how quickly you start to run into issues with the speed of light when you’re trying to optimize for network latency.
        saurik 6y ago
        I mean, the stated use case is for a music school. I actually live in a University town. We have tons of students all "working remotely" within a single mile radius of campus, and many of them are connected together by our campus intranet -- the University does wireless point-to-multipoint links to connect all of these random housing options (which include large buildings they simply bought in the community) -- which is something I think we could easily push to include more buildings. I bet we could easily pull off 2ms networking overhead. (And no: you are wrong about round trip. If you care about round trip time then 3ms of round trip by sound is so close that the violin player is going to be elbowing the singer. Sound is fundamentally slow, and you need to just accept that.)
        6y ago

by bhj 6y ago

saurik 6y ago

3ms by sound is only 3.36ft away.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
Distance from the source of sound is actually very important in live performances. There have been some empirical studies on it, but it’s still something people often get rather opinionated about. There is a reason though that a small ensemble can play to the beat of something like a drum, but a large ensemble like an orchestra can’t. There’s plenty of writing about how orchestras lag behind conductors and how different sections of orchestras have to take their timing queues differently depending on where they’re situated. 10ms is what I was always told was the generally accepted threshold after which a musician start to experience increased difficulty as a result of the latency. Which largely aligns with my own experience with audio latency. From there the difficulty just keeps increasing, and the performance quality keeps degrading until at some point the musicians and the audience gives up.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Thanks for writing this. I made the exact same point in another subthread, that 10ms is enough to mess with your brain. My only experience of it is when the audio and the visual out of sync by only about 10ms while watching something (I forget what). I can't watch anything like that for any real length of time, and I'm not even trying to play along.
  - saurik 6y ago
    10ms by light is 1862.824 miles away (which is approximately the distance from Los Angeles to Chicago). I honestly just don't think you are truly appreciating that light is almost a million times faster than sound.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      The refractive index of single model fiber is ~1.5. So 10ms of fiber transit is closer to 1250 miles. The fact that no two real world internet users are connected by a straight line of fiber optic cabling is going to bring that in even further. If you were relying on round trip latency for some reason, that would cut the distance in half. And that’s just for an idealized communication network. A real world use case would have a lot more latency introduced by routing/switching, and all of the typical quality issues you’d expect from ISPs. I used to live within line of sight of the data centre that hosted an online video game that I played, and the lower bound of my ping was about 15ms, it was usually in the 20s. Those factors are why something like this is unlikely to ever provide a high quality experience over even relatively short distances. I’ve just always found it interesting how quickly you start to run into issues with the speed of light when you’re trying to optimize for network latency.
      - saurik 6y ago
        I mean, the stated use case is for a music school. I actually live in a University town. We have tons of students all "working remotely" within a single mile radius of campus, and many of them are connected together by our campus intranet -- the University does wireless point-to-multipoint links to connect all of these random housing options (which include large buildings they simply bought in the community) -- which is something I think we could easily push to include more buildings. I bet we could easily pull off 2ms networking overhead. (And no: you are wrong about round trip. If you care about round trip time then 3ms of round trip by sound is so close that the violin player is going to be elbowing the singer. Sound is fundamentally slow, and you need to just accept that.)
        6y ago