basic digital audio ??

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Discussion related to installation, configuration and use of MOTU hardware such as MIDI interfaces, audio interfaces, etc. for Mac OSX
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daniel.sneed
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by daniel.sneed »

Some studio monitors have digital audio input.
Depending on the project and situation, some me may be good as keyboard amp.
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mikehalloran
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by mikehalloran »

daniel.sneed wrote:Some studio monitors have digital audio input.
100% of the ones I have used had noticeable latency. This is not an issue in a studio where you can compensate for it. Live? No thanks.

Digital mixers do some neat tricks to keep latency as low as possible(near zero) but it's impossible to avoid.
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bayswater
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by bayswater »

mikehalloran wrote:
daniel.sneed wrote:Some studio monitors have digital audio input.
100% of the ones I have used had noticeable latency.
Surely this is something that could be addressed. We can get latency from conversion down to a few ms in studio equipment. How are the converters in these boxes different?
mikehalloran wrote:Live? No thanks.
There is already latency from the placement of monitors and musicians and adding to it with conversion can't help. But when dinosaurs roamed the earth we didn't know about latency and didn't get concerned about playing 20 feet away from the drums, hearing them 20 ms after the drummer.
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mikehalloran
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by mikehalloran »

How are the converters in these boxes different?
Much, much simpler.
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daniel.sneed
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by daniel.sneed »

Just in case:
Playing guitar thru any software digital amp emulator, in a Mac or PC, will bring some noticeable latency. But this tends to become common these days.

A few years ago, I made a test with a drum VI in DP.
Tracking the hit on the drum pad with a mike (track1), and recording VI output (track2).
With buffer set to 68, global latency between the tracks was around 30ms.
That was summing internal drumpad latency, MIDI latency, usb latency, sample rise latency, cpu latency, ...
This did not include any output and monitoring latency, though, which was surely present, too.
But, gosh, 30ms is huge.
I was still able to play something. Go figure how...

AFAICR, this test was around DP7 days.
DP did improved its own induced latency since.
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bayswater
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Re: basic digital audio ??

Post by bayswater »

daniel.sneed wrote:Just in case:
Playing guitar thru any software digital amp emulator, in a Mac or PC, will bring some noticeable latency. But this tends to become common these days.

A few years ago, I made a test with a drum VI in DP.
Tracking the hit on the drum pad with a mike (track1), and recording VI output (track2).
With buffer set to 68, global latency between the tracks was around 30ms.
That was summing internal drumpad latency, MIDI latency, usb latency, sample rise latency, cpu latency,
I often track guitars through an original POD with a V2 ROM upgrade. Everything takes the round trip from analog to digital and back to analog before it goes into the main audio interface. If I keep the buffer in DP to about 256 or less, I don't notice the delay, and I can't detect any latency in the POD itself if I use phones on it's output to monitor. So even an old cheap unit like this can get at least conversion latency down to usable levels.

On drum pads, I have a variety of them with sensors going to DM5 triggers, and MIDI to DP. If I monitor both at source and from DP, I can hear the repeat at a buffer of 256, but at 128 it's not really noticeable unless I pay close attention to it.
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