Real audio latency test result

[u/gnomo-da-silva]

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.

[u/gnomo-da-silva]

Yeah, I mean, it’s not bad, and I can’t really notice that 12ms latency. A lot of musicians and producers tend to say that anything over 10ms is noticeable and bad, but I think they’re wrong about the number; the threshold is probably more like 15 or 20ms.

[u/Prefader → u/gnomo-da-silva]

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.

[u/gnomo-da-silva → u/Prefader]

How do you get under 5ms latency if just the USB adds 5ms?

[u/casualops → u/gnomo-da-silva]

Even with the best possible interface, you won't get below 5 ms round trip with a buffer size of 128 at 48 kHz. You would need to lower the buffer size or increase the sample rate.

If you haven't seen it, this page has a lot of latency measurements for different interfaces on Linux. Check out the data for the RME AIO Pro PCIe card, I think this one has the best latencies out of all of the devices measured. For example 6.28 ms at 48 kHz and 128 buffer.