Questions about Latency with Aark Q10/Sonar

wes480

New member
So I'm using Sonar 3 and loving it. I finally feel like I found a stable audio program that has some great features for a price I can live with.

I've never really understood or took the time to really look into the latency I was getting before - my card has always seemed to work ok, but I want to make sure I do it right this time.

First I noticed in the options of Sonar 3 that my latency was going to be 11.6ms when I used the ASIO Aardvark drivers. (Strangely, when I select WDM drivers, it tries to use the Creative card built into the motherboard...so I guess it's ASIO only for me with Sonar eh? Not that it matters...)

So then I opened the Aardvark Mixer, and went into the Latency options there. It said I was getting 20ms latency. I turned on "ASIO turbo mode" - don't know what it does, but it cuts the latency figure on the Aardvark mixer in half. Then I set my buffer size from 512 down to like 64. With those changes, the number then said 8 in the Aardvark mixer...I also set the "sample size" to 24 - though that didn't change the number.

So I went back to Sonar after saving the changes, and it said that my effective latency was now at 2.9ms! (Aardvark site said I should be able to get around 4).

My question is - are any of these figures "dangerous"? I know that if the latency is too low, it can introduce clicks, pops, dropouts - is there a chance any of that could happen without me really noticing it until it is too late? Should I adjust the numbers back up so that my latency is closer to 4 than 2.9?

Also, what is considered a good "workable" latency - assume you just work with audio tracks...doing fairly big mixes, etc...is 11.6ms unbearable? I don't know that I noticed any immediate difference when it went to 2.9...(assuming the Sonar numbers are accurate in the first place).

One more thing, when it comes to clicks and pops...in regards to latency - does this become more of a problem when working with several inputs at the same time, or several tracks playback, etc? I did my "test run" just on one track, and everything seemed great - could there be problems in the future with such a low latency on a bigger project?

As you can see, lots of questions...any help would be appreciated (on that WDM thing too - I always heard WDM was better than ASIO in some cases...)
 
ok, two new weird findings:

In the Aardvark ASIO settings - I found that with turbo mode enabled, at a 128 buffer setting, it says 8ms latency..

However, at a 256 buffer setting, it says 5ms...

Yet, Sonar says 2.9 when it's set at 128, and 5.8 when it's set at 256...which just leads me to believe Sonar knows whats up.

The weirder thing though in Sonar, it says "2.9ms effective latency at 44.1khz"...which is what I record in...

But I changed it to 48khz, just to see what happened, and the latency dropped to 2.7 effective...

I changed it to 96khz and it dropped to 1.3!

Why is it that the higher khz the lower the latency (but bit depth doesn't affect it).
 
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