Audio Latency Questions

[Trout]

Hi
I have several questions about possible audio latency settings for a unique combination of devices being drivin by windows xp pro.
brief hardware info:

Soyo Dragon KT400 Ultra "black edition"
Amd 2500+ Barton core 333
512 megs corsair PC2700 DDR
seagate 80 gig 7200rpm ata 100
Ati 7000 radeon 64 meg dual head
No Modem (system not used online)
CMI8738 onboard audio
M-Audio radium61 usb keyboard/device controller This One
Roland Digital recorder This One
Alesis Amplified Monitor/speakers Here

Software:
Windows XP Pro SP1 w/all patches
Stienberg Cubase SX

OK Now The Fun Part,, Questions we cant find answers for on any of the recording forums,Nor in the manuals for these devices.
Sync up of all the devices went ok,They all see and control each other, BUT
Latency is terrible.
We Hit a note on the keyboard,to playback live, or record,And theres a huge delay before the actual note deploys.
We saw this setup in a trade demo, And latency was only .3ms,
BUT ours is running at about 1 Full second+.
We were told by a rep, that its a windows setting, But,We are unable to locate any actual information about these settings,Or possible registry edit/settings that apply.
All of these componets are SUPPOSED to be Compatable with XP Pro,And its a very popular recording software,BUT,Actual settings and Good hints are very hard to locate.
Any info leading to the whereabouts of latency adjustments will be applauded~!!
Thanks
Trout

[Platypus]

CMI8738 onboard audio

We saw this setup in a trade demo, And latency was only .3ms,
BUT ours is running at about 1 Full second+.

Was the setup you saw running using onboard sound? For very low latency you'd expect to be using a good quality soundcard with low latency drivers, commonly ASIO. You can adjust the latency against buffer size in the sound driver.

Also, WinXP's USB driver setup is problematic for sound/MIDI devices, I believe there is a vastly improved version, is that already included in your patches? If not I'll see what I can find out about it. (The most awkward problem with USB is jitter, which changes the latency figure during use, so you can't compensate like you would for a constant latency by just moving the track. Firewire has the potential to be the better system, it's designed for uninterrupted media streaming.)

There are other hardware tuning issues too like bus mastering, other bus mastering devices in the system can cause glitching in the passage of sound data, so for example a video card which has the option in the driver to disable bus mastering can be helpful.

[confus-ed]

So let me 'decode & extrapolate' a bit ... (that's where I make it up to 'fit' ) ...

You see this funky setup on some 'unknown' kit, get taken in by some slick sales pitch, 'assume' that one lot of hardware is the same as another, put this 'setup' on some 'other' equipment & lo ... 'tis CRAP !

Well, the moral of the story is, check your facts (performance vs 'kit') .... & oh buy a 'decent' s/c & all will probably be well (You aren't ever gonna get good quality if you insist on using a soundcard that has almost all its processing done by the cpu, you want something with decent hardware acceleration to cut the cpu 'involvement' & thus much of your latency )

[Platypus]

A couple of forums that might be useful are at Sound On Sound, as per the links below, or www.computermusic.co.uk


http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Sep0...sician0902.asp

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct0...sician1002.asp

[Trout]

Hi Again,,
Thanks guys for the responses,
Heres a few responses as well as more info on our equipment,
Quote:
You see this funky setup on some 'unknown' kit, get taken in by some slick sales pitch, 'assume' that one lot of hardware is the same as another, put this 'setup' on some 'other' equipment & lo ... 'tis CRAP !

Actually,, we subscribe to several recording mags,As well as musician forums,And componet buying was based on research from good sources,Not Sales reps.
I mention the setup we saw at the trade show simply as a referance to the huge latency differance between 2 similar machines.
This setup was Not a Kit.

Though Not ideal, their* onboard sound displayed VERY little delay, perhaps 1/10th of what we are seeing. *Emachine w/everything onboard
I agree,, useing the cpu to process the sound card onboards not a best case scenerio,And this IS going to be changed in a month or so.
Despite being onboard sound,
Cubase has resident ASIO drivers for the onboard sound on this motherboard,
It installed them, ran its self tests Everything passed and no conflicts.

Pro 52 Is a standalone software keyboard/synth. clicking a key in pro 52 displays a terrible delay also.As well as ALL software keyboard/synths.
Even Clicking the test windows sounds button in Windows control panel has terrible delay.
Kinda reminds me of a soft start setting.

We Have shut off all animations,screen savers,power option,messenger,messenger service,all error reporting,auto-updates,yada yada as sugested in most of the forums and recording mags,With very little improvement.

Anyways,, I was more curious if there were perhaps some simple settings or regedit, that might improve this.
Thanks For The GREAT repsonses

[NooNoo]

Norton?