4 ms·

Soundcard-like devices called "audio interfaces"[1] -- now usually USB breakout boxes -- are alive and well in the professional audio segment, targeted at music

Soundcard-like devices called "audio interfaces"[1] -- now usually USB breakout boxes -- are alive and well in the professional audio segment, targeted at musicians, recording studios, video editing shops, and similar applications. They're not necessary for consumer apps. Consumer audio applications got "good enough" with mass produced builtin motherboard "soundcard on a chips" that basically replicated the function of the old soundcards at a much lower price point. If you want to, say, connect 16 microphones at once and record to 16 seperate tracks, or you plan to apply a bunch of digital effects and therefore want a much higher sample rate than what your consumer audio chip can do, you can buy an audio interface. [1] https://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio-recording/audio-interfaces/ https://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio-recording/audio-inter...

TremendousJudge 4y ago
Another use is rendering virtual instruments with low latency, so you can play with a keyboard and render sounds live. Built in sound chips usually have unacceptable levels of latency, even with custom drivers.
- rektide 4y ago
  It's been a while since I broke out & tuned JACK latency, but i think 2 samples of 3ms worked fine on most devices I'd tried, even without basics like a preemptible kernel, on boring old ancient intel chipsets. I'd expect most apps have no trouble getting under 16ms on basically any x86 hardware. I'd be shocked to find that the majority of these aftermarket devices do at all better. Many are usb, which, even if you do have a fancy isosynchronous device, I'd still expect to be significantly slower than in chipset or pcie. I could be totally off¡ But I dont think there's really specific chipset capabilities that make a bug difference here (other than iso, which only helps to counter the downgrade of using usb). Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing? I think it's just drivers, that modern tech like pipewire has many of the benefits for free about more closely mapping hardware resources to where apps can use it. I thought ASIO is mostly a product segmentation thing. It'd be neat to take a software virtual adapter like ASIO4ALL & see what kind of buffering really is required there, see what latency that brings consumer gear down to. I do also remember Android fighting to get their latency down to reasonable levels, which counter to my point suggests latency in general is somewhat hard. There are much fewer system resources there, not missing a tick is harder to insure, but iirc the bigger issue was just that modems & the regular audio subsystems just had really funky audio driver paths that's been slapped together for a really long time, & some modernjzatuon was drsperately needed. This was like... 7+ years ago maybe?
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    I can only speak for my own experience, but the cheapest Focusrite outperformed my builtin soundcard with ASIO4ALL drivers both in latency and quality. On the builtin, getting the latency lower than 12ms resulted in noticeable glitches.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    > Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing Yeah there's replacement ASIO drivers for the onboard sound such as ASIO4ALL or FLEXASIO. But I can agree with TremendousJudge that I've never gotten reasonable low latency with them, no matter my buffer size. CoreAudio on mac works just fine however.
gonehome 4y ago
Also required for fancy remote work from home microphone setups. If you want the Shure SM7B you need an audio interface (and probably also a cloud lift or dynamite to bump up the gain). Lots of streamers, podcasters, youtube people use them.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Actually, just an analog mic preamp (and for the SM7B or other very low output mics: one with super low noise or a cloudlifter in between) or compact mixer will get you up to line level, and then you're good to go with a motherboard sound interface if it has a line input jack. A better ADC (like in virtually any outboard audio interface) certainly doesn't hurt and would definitely be advisable for musicians, but it's far from necessary for a youtuber / home office use case.
  - lukego 4y ago
    I like the way you say "just" :) My experience is that a high-end device like MixPre II is fine with a dynamic mic. Focusrite or Tascam US needs a cloudlifter to get enough (clean) gain. Random stuff like BlueYeti is hopeless with crackling noise. So maybe you don't need a great ADC but you have to choose your audio interface very carefully (for its preamp.)
    - gonehome 4y ago
      It sounds like you know more about this stuff than I do - I’ve spent hours searching online but it’s hard to find good info. Why are mics like the SM7b better than mics like the MV7 or elgato one that just work over usb? I don’t understand how they actually work or why all the extra equipment (audio interface, gain booster, cables) is worth it - what’s the tradeoff being made when you use USB?
      - s__s 4y ago
        The SM7B is just trendy because a lot of famous podcasters use one. For just recording dialog, or doing video calls something simpler would be just fine. Getting super high end with microphones is only really applicable in the music industry IMO. Fun fact: Michael Jackson recorded the vocals for Thriller on an SM7B.
endorphine 4y ago
Another use case is decent vinyl rips.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Digitally mastered audio laboriously printed to analog vinyl so it can be shipped to you and then ripped into digital format (and probably listened to on EarPods). Delightful.
  - Jedd 4y ago
    I get the point you're making, but you're assuming a great deal. Vinyl records came out in the late 1940's. The first digital mastering was 1979 -- and it was quite a while before that became the default. So there's a huge window of exclusively analog mastering. And in both cases the likelihood that a random consumer would have access to the original (digital) master is negligible.
    - jen20 4y ago
      Plus the decades of shellac before that…
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    People who spin music on discs professionally could A: travel with their expensive vinyls in a case to whatever locations there may be, including when they get gigs in places like festivals in the jungle where the heat will melt those expensive things or B: Be happy this is a solution :) Back in the 90's in places like Goa the solution was using stuff like Sony's DAT format, or even minidiscs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - goolz 4y ago
    Some people prefer spinning plain vinyl rather than using a DVS + control plate.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
I came here to say this - USB sound cards are the kind of thing you can lease or rent out from music shops these days, which is pretty cool if you just need to DJ your cousin's wedding or something for a day on your laptop.

TremendousJudge 4y ago

Another use is rendering virtual instruments with low latency, so you can play with a keyboard and render sounds live. Built in sound chips usually have unacceptable levels of latency, even with custom drivers.

rektide 4y ago
It's been a while since I broke out & tuned JACK latency, but i think 2 samples of 3ms worked fine on most devices I'd tried, even without basics like a preemptible kernel, on boring old ancient intel chipsets. I'd expect most apps have no trouble getting under 16ms on basically any x86 hardware. I'd be shocked to find that the majority of these aftermarket devices do at all better. Many are usb, which, even if you do have a fancy isosynchronous device, I'd still expect to be significantly slower than in chipset or pcie. I could be totally off¡ But I dont think there's really specific chipset capabilities that make a bug difference here (other than iso, which only helps to counter the downgrade of using usb). Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing? I think it's just drivers, that modern tech like pipewire has many of the benefits for free about more closely mapping hardware resources to where apps can use it. I thought ASIO is mostly a product segmentation thing. It'd be neat to take a software virtual adapter like ASIO4ALL & see what kind of buffering really is required there, see what latency that brings consumer gear down to. I do also remember Android fighting to get their latency down to reasonable levels, which counter to my point suggests latency in general is somewhat hard. There are much fewer system resources there, not missing a tick is harder to insure, but iirc the bigger issue was just that modems & the regular audio subsystems just had really funky audio driver paths that's been slapped together for a really long time, & some modernjzatuon was drsperately needed. This was like... 7+ years ago maybe?
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I can only speak for my own experience, but the cheapest Focusrite outperformed my builtin soundcard with ASIO4ALL drivers both in latency and quality. On the builtin, getting the latency lower than 12ms resulted in noticeable glitches.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  > Windows has ASIO for low latency, but is that a hardware capability thing Yeah there's replacement ASIO drivers for the onboard sound such as ASIO4ALL or FLEXASIO. But I can agree with TremendousJudge that I've never gotten reasonable low latency with them, no matter my buffer size. CoreAudio on mac works just fine however.

gonehome 4y ago

Also required for fancy remote work from home microphone setups. If you want the Shure SM7B you need an audio interface (and probably also a cloud lift or dynamite to bump up the gain). Lots of streamers, podcasters, youtube people use them.

hunter2_ 4y ago
Actually, just an analog mic preamp (and for the SM7B or other very low output mics: one with super low noise or a cloudlifter in between) or compact mixer will get you up to line level, and then you're good to go with a motherboard sound interface if it has a line input jack. A better ADC (like in virtually any outboard audio interface) certainly doesn't hurt and would definitely be advisable for musicians, but it's far from necessary for a youtuber / home office use case.
- lukego 4y ago
  I like the way you say "just" :) My experience is that a high-end device like MixPre II is fine with a dynamic mic. Focusrite or Tascam US needs a cloudlifter to get enough (clean) gain. Random stuff like BlueYeti is hopeless with crackling noise. So maybe you don't need a great ADC but you have to choose your audio interface very carefully (for its preamp.)
  - gonehome 4y ago
    It sounds like you know more about this stuff than I do - I’ve spent hours searching online but it’s hard to find good info. Why are mics like the SM7b better than mics like the MV7 or elgato one that just work over usb? I don’t understand how they actually work or why all the extra equipment (audio interface, gain booster, cables) is worth it - what’s the tradeoff being made when you use USB?
    - s__s 4y ago
      The SM7B is just trendy because a lot of famous podcasters use one. For just recording dialog, or doing video calls something simpler would be just fine. Getting super high end with microphones is only really applicable in the music industry IMO. Fun fact: Michael Jackson recorded the vocals for Thriller on an SM7B.

endorphine 4y ago

Another use case is decent vinyl rips.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
Digitally mastered audio laboriously printed to analog vinyl so it can be shipped to you and then ripped into digital format (and probably listened to on EarPods). Delightful.
- Jedd 4y ago
  I get the point you're making, but you're assuming a great deal. Vinyl records came out in the late 1940's. The first digital mastering was 1979 -- and it was quite a while before that became the default. So there's a huge window of exclusively analog mastering. And in both cases the likelihood that a random consumer would have access to the original (digital) master is negligible.
  - jen20 4y ago
    Plus the decades of shellac before that…
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  People who spin music on discs professionally could A: travel with their expensive vinyls in a case to whatever locations there may be, including when they get gigs in places like festivals in the jungle where the heat will melt those expensive things or B: Be happy this is a solution :) Back in the 90's in places like Goa the solution was using stuff like Sony's DAT format, or even minidiscs.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- goolz 4y ago
  Some people prefer spinning plain vinyl rather than using a DVS + control plate.

jamal-kumar 4y ago

I came here to say this - USB sound cards are the kind of thing you can lease or rent out from music shops these days, which is pretty cool if you just need to DJ your cousin's wedding or something for a day on your laptop.