Latency is a measure of the time it takes (in milliseconds) for your audio signal to passed through your system. This delay is caused by the time it takes for your computer to receive, understand, process as needed, and send the signal back to your outputs.
High latency (slow signal time) is the enemy. High latency means it is taking too long for the audio in to become audio out. High latency will make you pull your hair out, guaranteed.
The lower your latency, the better your music will stay together and in sync, up to a point. If you try to push your latency too low, you might not be allowing the computer enough time to do what it needs to do, so under too-low latency conditions, your audio stream will break up into random static as it bogs down.
The key is to adjust your latency (either through your sound card settings, or through third-party audio drivers) as low as it can go without breaking up. How low your latency can be set is dependent on factors such as your computer speed, system bus speed, sound card performance, system memory, etc. In practice, you have to experiment to find your best performance settings.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
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3 comments:
Another giant problem with latency is when it's unpredictable. I'll take high, fixed latency over sometimes-low, sometimes-high, sometimes-medium latency any day!
Also, not to start any kind of flamefest, but latency control depends a lot on your operating system. Windows systems tend to be flaky on the latency. Mac OS X is better. RTLinux is great, if you're hardcore enough to give up the commercial application support.
The best of all, though, was BeOS.
Thanks for the additional observations.
Yes, Mac OS X (and the others you mentioned) do blow Windows out of the water for the audio reliability.
On Windows machines, some of the latency issues can be corrected with additional audio drivers, which is a topic I will be covering here soon.
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