[LAU] New laptop - advice needed

[Victor A. Stoichita]

Hi Atte,

I can confirm that you should easily get <10ms latency with a modern USB
card.
I have an i5 laptop (Asus UL30JT), so slightly less powerful than the one
you spotted. My first experiences on it were with the Edirol UA-25 (the old
model, not the EX one). That's USB 1. Jack would start at 8ms and be
plainly usable with Ardour: 4-5 tracks, some plugins on each.
Then I tried a Scarlett 2i4 for a couple of days. It's USB 2. Jack would
start at ridiculously low latencies, like 2ms or so. But working with the
same Ardour sessions was still only possible at 8ms. So I figure the
bottleneck is my CPU rather than USB. I brought the card back anyway.
Eventually, I opted for the Komplete Audio 6. This could fit your minimal
requirements of "4in (2 of these should be phantom power) + 4out". Latency
is the same as with the Scarlett: Jack starts very low, but for what I'm
doing, with an i5 CPU, 8ms is the most reasonable choice. I find it's a
very good soundcard, very clean preamps, it works out of the box on Linux.
So if you end up looking for a USB card, you could consider that one.

A note on the Lenovo U310 which you spotted: it has 2 x USB 3 and 1 x USB
2. This looks good because it could mean that the USB 2 slot is not on an
internal combo (as is the case with some other laptops, mine included). It
should be better for latency, and possibly diminish the risk of noise
interferences. You may however be restricted to using that slot for the
soundcard, as USB 2 devices are not guaranteed to work on a USB 3 slot.

Cheers,
Victor


On 19 August 2013 08:28, Atte André Jensen <atte at youmail.dk> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm replacing my lenovo X61s (dualcore 1.6Ghz) laptop, mostly due to a
> hard drive that's starting to fail and need some advice.
>
> I'm having problems finding something that has the right balance between
> specs and price *and* has firewire. This means I might have to replace my
> Edirol FA-66 with an USB based sound card. Will I be able to get low
> latancy (<10ms) and reliable performance from an USB sound card? Any
> suggestions for a sound card (minimum 4in (2 of these should be phantom
> power) + 4out) what will provide zero-latency monitoring and work
> out-of-the-box with linux?
>
> Right now I'm leaning towards a Lenovo IdeaPad U310 core i7, with 500GB HD
> + 24GB SSD, the idea would be to install the system on the SSD and have the
> data sit on the slower HD:
> http://laptops.dk/product_**info.php?cPath=203&products_**id=4875<http://laptops.dk/product_info.php?cPath=203&products_id=4875>
> Any reasons this would be a bad/good choice?
>
> --
> Atte
>
> http://atte.dk   http://modlys.dk
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