[PD-ot] how low (latency) can you go?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Yeah, drummers have by far the most sensitivity to latency.  That's  
something I overlooked with my last post about latency.  Good  
drummers can also control impacts to sub-millisecond accuracy, in the  
case of something like two drumsticks hitting one after the other.   
This is due to muscle control though, this is happening far to  
quickly for the audio feedback loop.

But the crux of the matter is that looking only at latency is missing  
whole picture of what is going on.  You would be much better off with  
a solid 30ms of latency than a range of 5-10ms of latency.  So jitter  
measurements should be performed as well.

Another thing that is not mentioned is blind testing.  If you believe  
that something should be better, you will perceive a difference  
regardless of whether its there or not.  A good example is your  
mouse.  Try moving the mouse around and then guess the latency of  
your mouse.  For a USB mouse, the best it gets is 10ms (with low  
jitter), yet I doubt few notice it.

That points out another key aspect of this: what you are used to.   
Musicians are quite sensitive to change.  Violinists can tell  
amazingly tiny differences in the response of different violins, for  
example.  You will notice a change, but if you practice with any  
given setup, you will adapt.  I doubt that there is a noticeable  
difference in performance abilities for people of equal experience on  
a system of 10ms vs. a system of 30ms.

.hc

On Dec 16, 2006, at 5:03 PM, patrick wrote:

> hi IOhannes,
>
> for me low latency means that i can manipulate (effecting,  
> recording, fiddling, destroying) in realtime 8 adc~ without adding  
> a lag (and hopefully someday without glitches). musicians cannot  
> process very well delay in what they are playing, it's worst for  
> drummers i guess!
>
> patrick
>
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