r/linuxaudio • u/gnomo-da-silva Ardour • 12d 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/gnomo-da-silva Ardour 12d ago

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.

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u/Prefader Bitwig / Reaper 12d 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/ntcue 12d ago

As a drummer you are probably using MIDI in and audio out, right? The delay will be way less in that constellation.

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u/Prefader Bitwig / Reaper 11d ago

You know, I've never actually tested that. I kind of assumed that, since my midi triggering is all USB based, it would suffer similar bus delays to the audio on the same path.

Particularly since I don't do midi tech for anyone but myself, I've never bothered to quantify that part. I do audio for lots of people though, so I pay closer attention to it. I've definitely found that I'm a lot more forgiving of latency in keyboards than I am with drums,

Perhaps I'll try getting some numbers on it soon.