Latency (again)

  • Thread starter Thread starter SheHadTheJack
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SheHadTheJack

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Hi. This new Lexicon Omega of mine seems like a nice thing, but i have a big problem. I have a big Latency.

I use Cubase LE, Lexicon Omega, and a laptop with the specs: Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+, 2.13 Ghz, 512 Mb ram.

I used to use asio2all (or asio4all) drivers, giving me a much lower latency, but still not very low. I had expected that the ASIO drivers would be much better.

My latency is 500/8 in cubase LE, any lower will cause bad sound within time (no effects or anything, just clean guitar sound).

What can i do, shouldnt my computer be able to go much lower
 
Is'nt that thing connected thru USB? I would'nt expect too much out of USB but I could be wrong. Have you checked out MusicXP.net?
 
yes it goes through USB, are you telling me i´ve wasted my money, i guess i could still get another thing.

musicXP, i´ll check it out.
 
I'm not saying you wasted your money. What I'm saying is that alot of people that get USB interfaces experience higher latencies than those with firewire and pci interfaces. I don't know anything about your specific interface. If you're running other USB devices, they will eat up the bandwidth available to your interface.
 
I used to use a tascam us-428 which connected over usb 1.1 (slow) to record 4 tracks of 24bit/48khz tracks while listening to a stereo mix, very acceptable latecy and no stuttering or glitching. The difference was that it was connecting to a desktop computer with 2 7200rpm drives on a RAID stripe array.
I would guess that if you have a bottleneck, it's in your laptop's hard drive, those drives usually have a spindle speed of around 4200rpm, that's much slower than even crappy full-sized drives, which is the main reason that most of the mobile turn-key recording solutions you see advertised include an external hard drive.
I would get on the market for an external drive, or just a drive enclosure in which you install your own drive if you're comfortable with that.
I would look for something that has a firewire interface (may also be referred to as ieee1394) if your laptop has a matching interface. Otherwise, try to find something that features a "usb 2.0" connection, as that is also quite fast, although it will eat up more of your laptop's processing power when in action.
You should be able to find enclosures from around 25.00 on up at newegg.com and full external drives starting around 100.00.
 
Last edited:
SheHadTheJack said:
Hi. This new Lexicon Omega of mine seems like a nice thing, but i have a big problem. I have a big Latency.

I use Cubase LE, Lexicon Omega, and a laptop with the specs: Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+, 2.13 Ghz, 512 Mb ram.

I used to use asio2all (or asio4all) drivers, giving me a much lower latency, but still not very low. I had expected that the ASIO drivers would be much better.

My latency is 500/8 in cubase LE, any lower will cause bad sound within time (no effects or anything, just clean guitar sound).

What can i do, shouldnt my computer be able to go much lower
Click to expand...

What is 500/8? 500 samples and your latency is 8 ms?

Here's a review of your unit
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar04/articles/lexiconomega.htm

I would want to try this unit on a decent desktop and see what happens. I don't believe the problem is with the Lexicon even thought it's USB 1 it should be able to achieve a workable latency.
 
After reading that sound on sound review, USB does'nt sound as awful as I thought. Looks like there are good and bad interfaces no matter what connection type.
 
That review was one of the reasons why i decided on the Omega, it sounded like a good deal, but i hadnt realized it was USB 1.0.

Yes i meant: 500 buffer size, 8 numbers of buffers

Where do i see the speed of my harddrive ?
 
Open up the case and look at your hard drive's lable. The info could be printed on the label. If not, get the model number off of the label and look it up.
 
just look up your model of laptop on the manufacturer's website, you should be able to find detailed specs.

Aaron
 
Its kinda expensive to upgrade laptops... and most the time you won't want to do them yourself.

I don't know much about latency but I got a firewire interface that experiences latency in some programs and no latency in others. For example I got the Mackie 400f firewire interface that comes with Tracktion 2. When I used tracktion to record I get latency (which can be setup to get rid of it I just haven't quite figured it out yet...). Now when I used Adobe Audition 1.5 I don't have to set anything and get no latency.

So I can't believe that the Omega is the problem. Because the engineers probably spent a good ammount of time getting all that to work right. I mean the Omega isn't the cheapest thing out there so I can't believe they would produce a product that is so obviously flawed as to not resolve latency issues.

I would go to Omegas website and get the latest drivers... then keep trouble shooting on forums like this one. I'm sure theres a solution somewhere...

I also heard that Windows Service pack 2 sometimes get a bug where firewire transfer rate is reduced dramatically (like by 3 times) and Microsoft put out a fix for that problem. Maybe there is some type of issue with usb ports as well ? If you use windows maybe look into that on microsofts website and or searching google.com will bring some information up. Also try searching google for "(Product & model number here) Latency Issues"...

Hope thats somewhat helpful.
 
I´ll try out your hints. Just spend some time with musicxp.net and defragmentation. Also used adaware and spybot. Helped quite a lot. my buffers are now 130/8 by defaults in cubase LE, but i had to make the buffers 8 to make it run smooth.
I was thinking of buying an external harddisk anyway, so why not buy an internal and give that extra amount of money.
Just realized i have 1012 ram. So i guess it must be the harddisk being the bottle neck. Im willing to try it.
 
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