latency with usb

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phlopip

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how much latency do you guys get with an 8 or 16 channel usb interface?
 
Tascam M-164UF 16 channels USB 2.0 @ 24/48 = 6.5ms latency
 
does this amount of latency affect your recordings that much. i only ask becuase i want to get the line6 ux8 and its usb so if i record drums i'll be using alot of channels, but line6 promises "near zero latency"
 
phlopip said:
does this amount of latency affect your recordings that much. i only ask becuase i want to get the line6 ux8 and its usb so if i record drums i'll be using alot of channels, but line6 promises "near zero latency"
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Be careful with the "near zero" or "zero" latency statement. That means real time monitoring which is an unprocessed analog in-analog out signal. What causes latency is the analog signal going into your digital unit, the signal being converted, sent to the computer, run through the software, back out as digital, and reconverted to analog through headphones. The way to reduce latency is have a fast machine. I am able to record my drums with 9 mics at 1.1 ms because I have an i7 2.8(?) gHZ processor, running on windows 7 x64 and 4 gb of RAM.

With that being said, I believe the human ear can only register above 9ms or so of latency.

Here is a better explanation of latency

http://www.novationmusic.com/answerbase/en/article.php?id=354
 
Last edited:
phlopip said:
does this amount of latency affect your recordings that much. i only ask becuase i want to get the line6 ux8 and its usb so if i record drums i'll be using alot of channels, but line6 promises "near zero latency"
Click to expand...

Be real careful with your expectations.

In REAL WORLD double-blind tests, doctors found that most humans can't really hear below 20-30ms latency. Cranking your system down only stresses the CPU and does nothing more than give you bragging rights and more chances that something will go bloooey.

You only need to take it down to where you can't hear it anymore and then after that it doesn't really matter.

(and in the old days of less reliable systems it was a common practice to lower latency for recording and then go back into the control panel and raise it to get acceptable performance for mixing.)
 
captbz13 said:
Tascam 1641 1.1 ms with 9 inputs going
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Your software is lying to you. (Sadly, that's fairly common.) Typical real-world minimum round-trip latency for USB is about 10 ms, though I seem to recall that there are some tricks you can do when writing device drivers that get that down to about 8 ms round trip.

FireWire minimum is about 5-6 ms round trip. Latencies below that are basically only possible on PCI, PCIe, or HyperTransport busses, and even they don't generally go much below about 3-4 ms, IIRC. A round-trip latency of 1.1 ms is just pure comedy.
 
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