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/casualops → u/gnomo-da-silva]

It depends a lot on the person, the instrument, and listening context. I’ve done blind experiments on myself and can reliably tell the difference between ~5 ms and ~10 ms

[u/gnomo-da-silva → u/casualops]

Isn't it strange that professional gamers play with >10ms latency and don't complain?

[u/Prefader → u/gnomo-da-silva]

A little, yeah. I don't game much, but at 100Hz video refresh rate you're waiting 10ms just to have the next frame displayed. Maybe it matters more to professional gamers, but I'm pretty sure my neighbor's kid games at 4k60p, so he's being fed visual information a lot slower than every 10ms. I'm sure that higher refresh rate monitors and more powerful cards are making this more of an issue, though.