hi.
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
as always when it comes to latency and people tell numbers, i have to ask my question: have you measured this? how? or was it just "putting a number somewhere and assuming that it's the real latency"? how much load do your settings allow?
Yes, its true, I am too lazy to do an actual measurement. I am just talking about the buffer setting.
thank you for this clarification. i think it is important to have such things articulated correctly. as soon as the word "latency" can be found on the web, i am pretty sure that a lot of myth and rumour are involved. people keep telling that they can go as low as 3ms in pd, which is simply not possible.
For what I do, I don't really need much lower.
this is fine for you.
And always, when talking about latency, I feel the need to point out the speed of sound: 340 m/s or .34 m/ms. So if your speakers are 2m away from you, that's 6ms of latency. You could spend days tweaking your machine to get 3ms less latency, or you could move 1m closer to your speakers. Puts things into perspective...
this is correct. but unfortunately perspectives can change. as a musician you might be happy with one machine adding latency of 3ms. however, it is common practice to stack several machines (synthesizers, effect-hardware, PCs), all adding a small latency. if you have 3 machines, all with a perfectly low latency of 10ms, you get a resulting latency of 30ms which might be intolerably low.
that is just music. as soon as you get into technical applications, things get far worse (e.g. there might really be a need to get as low as 2ms).
so again: it is my concern to get clarity when people use the term "latency". i have done a lot of latency measurements over the last years; usually the numbers i saw in various control panels (be it jack, pd, rme hammerfall's settings,...) are not identical with the actual latency; though the often (not always) directly related.
mf.asdr IOhannes
PS: thanks to all of you for your explanations about latency; my remark was really not about latency (what it is; what you need) but about what we think when we hear the buzzword "latency".