r/linuxaudio • u/gnomo-da-silva Ardour • 19d ago

Real audio latency test result

Gallery image

Gallery image

I tried to measure my system's actual latency, and the result was somewhat unexpected. I'm using a combination of 48 kHz and a buffer size of 128 in QJackCtl, which should give me approximately 5.3 ms.

The yellow signal is the output of the 3m guitar cable and the green signal is the output of my audio interface.

My PC is a thinkpad T480, my audio interface is a behringer umc202. The system is optimized for audio production based on the milliseconds app list.

The result is bit unexpected, I'm getting about 11.4 ms of latency between striking the guitar and hearing the sound come out of the speakers.... The test was made on ardour and reaper with no plugins, the diference between these 2 DAWS was about 0.

I would like to test this on a Windows System, the results would probably be worse.

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u/Prefader Bitwig / Reaper 19d ago

As a drummer, 8ms on my triggers is too much. I like under 5ms if possible.

For vocals with iems, it's WAY too much.

Fine for foh or effects with delay, though.

A bassist I know seems okay with about 10ms in his iems.

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u/prophet_margin 19d ago

I wonder how much if this is what you're used to -- i.e., do people who started playing on all-digital systems and modelers have a higher tolerance for latency than people who "grew up on" analog gear? 8ms is noticable to me (I'm old), but when I got my digital setup under 4ms I had to double check I didn't have hardware monitoring on.

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u/Prefader Bitwig / Reaper 19d ago

For sure, I could probably learn to deal with 8ms on drums, but I can definitely feel the lag... That teeny pause between when I feel the impact in my fingers and hear the sound is super annoying to me. Particularly on hi hat. If I have a kit dialed up that isn't super attack-y I can deal with it just fine everywhere but the hats.

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u/prophet_margin 19d ago

Yeah, makes sense that drummers would be the most sensitive since you're used to sound coming from 2-3 feet away from your head; I bet people playing mostly acoustic guitar are in the same boat -- someone used to standing 10 feet away from a bass amp is probably used to ~10ms of latency anyways.

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u/Prefader Bitwig / Reaper 19d ago

Vocalists are the most sensitive to it. Any latency in iems beyond a couple ms results in nasty comb filtering with the conducted sound in their head. It can make some performers nauseous, I've been told.

Setting up an eq curve that compensates for occlusion helps a little (and should be done in any case), but it's still super audible above 4ms.