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Hello guys,

after I proceeded to gain skill, I felt that mistakes were due to Software, because too high-latency.
Even on High-End Scale of Hardware.
Even at 1ms or sub 1ms, note on and note off events seem to stack.

Whenever I use a VSTi, it's not as smooth as on the Piano Onboard Audio of the RD-2000.
Even if it sounds worse, for practice and live-play, you want the least latency possible.
I had tried many stuff now and wasted a lot of time for research for the ultimate piano sound.

It doesn't matter what Software I use. It's all the same.

Best regards

How much latency are you getting? I'm at around 2 msec.

If you're not going to use VSTs, what'll it be? Back to native voice? Might be difficult; I would find it so.

I'm at 1.0 ms RTL with crazy settings.



Yes, the native voice of the Roland RD-2000

I was using a bunch of very expensive VSTi so far, and none did it!

I did a blind ABX test. I had to not play more than two note trills to find out when it gets really annoying. That is at 1.5ms.
But even 1ms I can feel.

It's not like 1ms is actually 1ms! There is note-off delay and note-on delay. It stacks imo.
But I'm very, very sensitive to everything and I may be 1 in 500.000 people.

I don't know the absolute e2e latency on my VSTs, but I can understands how to feel. My current setup has just enough latency to tolerate, and I can tell because in headphones it's fine, but on speakers there is a perceptible enough delay to be annoying. So I believe the extra time taken for the sound to travel from the speakers to my ears (all but eliminated when using headphones) is introducing enough latency to be noticeable.

I suspect you are doing something wrong. sub-millisecond latency is not noticeable. Are you on Windows? If on Windows, did you install and use an ASIO driver?

I also suspect something is wrong with the setup.

<= This is correct. You must be getting delay from somewhere else. How about your MIDI settings? Your MIDI controller may have silly latency which is independent of your audio interface.

Neurons speed are in ms range. Anything less 10ms is not perceivable or very hard to perceive.

It really depends on the situation. If you're listening to a performance, and the music starts 1ms later, that's in no way perceptible.

But if you have two distinct clicks separated by 1ms, you can absolutely hear the gap.

When playing a piano, if for example the sound the key striking the keybed is loud enough, you might notice if the note follows it by just a few ms. A 1-2ms delay from silence is harder to tell.

I have reproduced it both on Windows 10 1909 and (Hackintosh Catalina)
It's consistent. No Audio tweak could help. I'm using a RME HDSPe AIO.
As I said before, there is a small amount of people who can blindly tell you whether there is latency by perception.
It's about how the Instruments responds and recreates.

>Neurons speed are in ms range. Anything less 10ms is not perceivable or very hard to perceive.

Truth. But there is a caveat!

RTL has been measured on Windows and it was correct. At the same setting, on MAC, Reaper reported up to 2 ms less.
ANY input/output latency will make a difference in playing. It's not about your own perception, but the way the audio gets constructed.
Let's say you play two notes very fast as a drill, when you let the key go to retrigger, the Key-OFF Event over MIDI has been triggered.
Since you play it so fast and immediately play the next note, there is not enough time for keeping things discernible.
To compensate, you have to lift off your finger faster. But this is annoying for me at play.

The outcome in tone was different. The VSTi would then sound almost like two notes were played at once or even drop some.

As conclusion - VSTi may could serve as a rendering utility, but never for live play in my situation.
A long time I thought the latency has to be good enough, since I use the best available Hardware for MIDI processing. But I was proven wrong by my own.

The RTL isn't as reliant as you may think. There is added latency to some VSTi. This is my ranking list for latency:

1. Pianoteq (native)
2. Kontakt

[Others]

Somewhere at the end of the spectrum : [...] VSL Synchron Pianos

And for the last part, I'm very very sensible to everything.

I couldn't say it better. I didn't had the right words to explain it that short. Thanks!
However, it lacks that little detail that if you play fast enough some notes aren't properly registered and not distinguishable and almost feel like kissing each other. Gap too small!

I had a teacher which detect something “wrong” when looping MIDI from my piano back to the piano. The MIDI chain may add 3ms, no more (1ms piano->MIDI USB adaptor, 1ms adaptor-> PC, 1ms back to the piano).

My measured end-to-end latency (Yamaha USB interface, ASIO driver, smallest buffer size) is 12 ms after builtin tones trigger. That's too much for my taste.

This sounds like a technical problem. It happens when buffers are too big, which messes with the timing resolution.

Sometimes there are some piano samples that have a little delay, or a slightly longer attack, so even if your equipment had a latency <1ms you always would feel the latency, being that it's not in the hardware chain, but in the sample itself!

Agreed. There are some rudimentary academic studies supporting this.

With headphones vs loudspeakers you save about 3ms. That is an inexpensive & powerful latency tweak.

Good digital piano engineers have the opportunity to develop and tune dedicated, efficient internal sensor-sound systems. It should be tough to outperform the Yamaha N1x with some generic home computer MIDI scheme. With lower grade keyboards, anything is possible. This is just speculation and I haven't seen any evidence one way or another.


- What type of buffer are you using? That HDSPe should get to buffers 32, if your computer is capable and has a very high-performance CPU. With a weak computer, RME will not permit access those low buffers. I have seen a handful of Pros posting with lower buffers on RME drivers, maybe 24 or 16. (48 is the lowest that the BabyFace Pro will hit).

- Make sure the HDSPe has updated drivers (v4.29?) as some of the older drivers underperformed.

- Apple adds additional hidden buffers so typically if you set a buffer of say 64, maybe you are actually getting 96 or 128. Not sure if RME worked around that. In the real world it doesn't matter, unless you are trying to run at absolutely lowest latency as you are, where Windows might perform slightly lower latency, in theory.

Are you using USB or DIN MIDI cables from the controller?

- The serial DIN cable scheme is really slow and will backlog if you are playing fast with lots of chords. That will create lots of long, odd delays and a most irritating form of jitter.

- Modern USB and good drivers should resolve speed issues in theory. MIDI Association has no limit on speeds. But there are plenty of caveats such as Windows and driver implementation, and just how the keyboard controller is outputting USB MIDI data (e.g. some keyboards might cripple USB midi data to mirror DIN midi data, but I have never seen anyone confirm one way or another).

Yes but to offset it you need hardware that even not already exist. And if it's not sampled but modeled, the problem is much less there.
But - since I like the Roland modeling more - befitting my Device better, I use it instead.

- Make sure the HDSPe has updated drivers (v4.29?) as some of the older drivers underperformed.

Up to date

- Apple adds additional hidden buffers so typically if you set a buffer of say 64, maybe you are actually getting 96 or 128. Not sure if RME worked around that. In the real world it doesn't matter, unless you are trying to run at absolutely lowest latency as you are, where Windows might perform slightly lower latency, in theory.

I didn't knew that, but the OS didn't make a difference.

- Are you using USB or DIN MIDI cables from the controller?

DIN MIDI

- The serial DIN cable scheme is really slow and will backlog if you are playing fast with lots of chords. That will create lots of long, odd delays and a most irritating form of jitter.

I didn't knew that again

- Modern USB and good drivers should resolve speed issues in theory. MIDI Association has no limit on speeds. But there are plenty of caveats such as Windows and driver implementation, and just how the keyboard controller is outputting USB MIDI data (e.g. some keyboards might cripple USB midi data to mirror DIN midi data, but I have never seen anyone confirm one way or another).

USB won't be faster than 1ms except polling would be higher than 1000hz which is very unlikely.

Sampling doesn't have greater latency than modelling.

Your neurons (if you are an average person ) can detect a 10 microsecond latency difference between ears.