3 ms·
> USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience. This may be tr
by cassianoleal 4y ago
> USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience.
This may be true but I've never had latency issues with USB soundcards. Right now I have a Line6 Helix Floor unit that I use to play guitar with. I can route the audio through the Helix effects, into Logic and back to Helix for more post-processing and have no latency problems.
I have had other brands and models and none introduced perceivable latency.
I don't use MIDI but I doubt it requires less latency than live guitar playing.
I had a PCIe soundcard a few years ago that made it almost impossible to get rid of ground hum though.
- lp0_on_fire 4y agoI also have latency issues with USB soundcards and MIDI devices, specifically. Tried multiple vendors and in each one introduced ~100-200 milliseconds of delay. The old PCI SoundBlaster Audigy card I had 20 years ago with a the standard DIN MIDI interface was orders of magnitude better, even running Windows XP.
- andybak 4y agoFor audio is that via Directsound (if that's still a thing), ASIO or what? Last time I did audio, installing ASIO4ALL was essential.
- piva00 4y agoMIDI latency is a pain in the ass, audio latency is negligible with any USB soundcard I've used, buffer sizes and latency compensation in DAWs matter. Adjusting your MIDI timing to compensate the jittery of MIDI on a PC is also important. Or get an external MIDI clock like the E-RM Multiclock and never bother about MIDI latency issues. Audio is completely fine, 30-50μs of latency won't ever be perceptible to humans, the latency of MIDI will.
- jasomill 4y agoThis is emphatically not true for USB interfaces in general. In particular, the first readily available set of benchmark results I was able to find[1] suggest the difference in audio (not MIDI) latency between the lowest-latency PCIe cards and the listed USB devices (RME Fireface UFX+ USB3 and RME Babyface Pro [USB2]) is under a millisecond. While I couldn't find similar results for MIDI I/O, it seems unlikely that either of these USB devices' MIDI interfaces would introduce an order of magnitude more latency than their audio counterparts. [1] https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=15796206&postcount=5092 https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=15796206&postcoun...