What is "latency" and how does it work?

[Chad Seiter]

Hi All,

As digital technology in audio has been increasing to the home user lately, I\'ve heard the word \"latency\" more and more, and I don\'t really know what it means. I have seen on this board and the Nemesys board that 7ms is decent, but not great (which would be the Delta DIO 2496 set to 384, I guess), but 512 (WAY over 7ms) is bad.

What I\'m asking is, what IS latency? How does it work? Is it only if you do live MIDI things that it\'s affected, or what? What problems can it cause?

Thanks
Chad

[Chad Seiter]

Thanks for the reply, Lee... as I\'m getting more serious in the world of digital music, it\'s becoming increasingly important for me to know these things. I figured that\'s what latency was, but I didn\'t know to what extent that it existed.

If I had, say, gigastudio and a sequencer, and I was doing a click track, and recording several tracks separately, then the latency wouldn\'t matter, I\'d imagine - right? After all, all the click tracks are also affected by the 7ms latency, or whatever latency I have for it. The only problem would be if I had another device, say an external MIDI keyboard with a line in for it\'s sounds, then it would have a different latency, would it not?

I swear, sometimes it\'s easier to just write it on the piano. images/icons/smile.gif The only sequencer I would need is in my head and it has 0 latency... well, for the most part! images/icons/rolleyes.gif

Chad