17 Jun
2003
17 Jun
'03
7 a.m.
you are right that for good real-time
'play-ability' one wants the latency
as low as possible, but I believe that you didn't get my point that the low
latency should not be achieved at the expense of high jitter. Running a soft
synth with a latency of 10ms would work perfectly OK, though if that same soft
synth had a 10ms jitter it would far for easy be audible.
Hi Frank,
Yes, I guess I did miss your point about jitter ... I was under the
impression you were saying that with regards to soft-synths, people
don't care about lag as long as the sound quality is good. I
apologize for any harshness that came through in my attitude... I
consider LAD to be prime pioneer territory for new audio hackers, and
I do get a little zealous in my misguided reproaches, especially when
de-cloaking from lurk mode. Bad habit.
It is a fine line. Nobody knows that better than us, and we work
hard to make sure we account for factors such as were discussed here!
Especially during a live performance the low jitter is
important. Musicians
are used to perform with small latency... think about the time it takes
before the sound emitted from a speaker arrives at the ear.
Well, sure, but I measure latency in terms of "processing-time ->
audio output", not "audio output -> to my ears". The latency of
sound is a constant which nobody can change - not the case with the
latency of a synthesizer.
If you are talking about extremely high latency like
200ms or more I agree
with you. But if recording engineers are whining that a latency of 10ms is
too high for them to make a mix they better find a new job...
Heh heh.
I feel amost sorry <grin> for those musicians
that are playing electric
guitars are are a few meters away from their amps. Not to mention those
realy poor sound engineers doing the live mix for the FOH (front of house)
PA system of an open air concert (distance from mixing desk to FOH for
example 50m; causing a whopping 150ms of latency). Despite all of this,
those magicians do manage to make great sounding music without any concerns
about the latency.
Sure, operating in that environment is what makes them a professional.
I noticed that you are working for Access, and have a
vague clue where the
misunderstanding might come from. I presume the Virus DSPs are running the
algoritms blockless, ie. rendering one sample and streaming it to the DACs.
Our technique is a trade secret which I have no say over, so I can't
really go into it ... but the assumption is not 100% accurate.
Christoph has implemented a very innovative approach to solving these
sorts of problems, lets just say that, and I am yet to see a similar
implementation outside of extreme academia ...
--
;
Jay Vaughan
r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/