[LAU] Value of low-latency in audio?

[Kevin Cosgrove]

On 15 December 2009 at 21:37, Dan S <danstowell+lxau at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you think 64ms is fine then you're probably not doing live
> beatboxing processing ;). For percussive sounds especially, the
> latency is immediately obvious to a live musician - for many
> performers a high latency also manifests in a tendency to slow your
> tempo down (lagging your performance to keep in sync with the lagged
> output)...

In a recording project a few years back I looked at track
waveforms and found that when my drum tracks were within 5ms
of the other players, then we sounded really tight.  But, when
we wandered by 25ms from each other, then we started to sound
sloppy.  This isn't specifically a latency issue.  I bring it
up just to give some sort of feeling to the numbers.

Later recordings of Steely Dan might be in the sub 10ms tightness
zone, though I haven't looked.  Greenday might be greater than
50-75ms on some of their stuff.  ;-)   Which just goes to show
that while there is engineering in all of this, there also is
art and feel.

I hope that's useful....

--
Kevin