Why does cheap integrated sound have better latency than expensive audio interface..?

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I have an x-fi card in my opinion it doesn't hold a candle to my steinberg MR816 fire wire interface in terms of low latency and stability.
What stability problems do you have? I never got it crashing (except once because I had left their driver auto-update running & they updated with broken ones).

As for latency, it goes down to 2ms.. but anyone sane wouldn't go under 5-10ms, whatever the soundcard (for other reasons than the soundcard).
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I'll call the Emperor's New Clothes out too on this one. I play in a band, using a high-end Sony Vaio Z's integrated soundcard (just the Intel one on the motherboard) and Asio4All. For my job I have access to a $650 Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus, and tried it out on my laptop. While I had no problems using the drivers, the latency was no different than using the internal soundcard, but what really surprised me was that I could not hear a difference in sound quality either. I'm sure if I connected one of our digital scopes I could find a difference in the noise floor, but it sure was not audible to me, and in the context of playing in a 5 piece rock band would never be noticed.

I can see an advantage to using an external audio interface if you need it for the hardware connections, but with a decent laptop I really don't see the need for it if you're just taking midi data in and sending stereo audio out.

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whyterabbyt wrote:Apple, however, do seem to be drawing further and further away from their stalwart 'content creation' loyalists. Im genuinely surprised at how much dissent/annoyance Im hearing from folk 'round here who not so long ago were Apple diehards.
I'm surprised as well. Both OSX and Windows users have benefited from Apple's former catering to pro audio -- it set a higher standard for the Windows side, too. I was jealous when my friend brought over his Macbook Pro, I plugged a 1/8" jack into the audio out, plugged in the USB from my midi controller and we were instantly playing virtual instruments in Logic. That kind of thing sets a high standard for plug and play. I'd hate to see Apple drift away from that.

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golemus wrote: Well look at Native Instruments, they have sold probably much more audio interfaces than any other vendor in the last 1-2 years (most of them in the form of DJ controller though), and they are still unable to make drivers that are trouble free.

The same with M-Audio. Fasttrack Pro was in TOP-10 sold audio interfaces in Thomann for like 1-2 years or even longer and the drivers (at least for Windows 7) are horrible piece of shit causing a LOT of trouble.
I'm not going to defend M-audio past the fact that driver support under Avid improved by a vast amount. In fact all the devices that were released whilst they were at the helm where they developed them and wrote the drivers from the ground up were largely solid as concrete (I'm thinking of the C series units). The older legacy devices that they inherited from the pre-takeover company on the other hand could be patchy, but that came down to the controllers in use and what they had to speak to at the other end in the system. They could have fixed it by changing the hardware in use for sure, but then they would have had to support two lots of drivers and in the end it would have been more cost effective to run down the stock they inherited and develop a new range as they did.

The NI kit I've used on decent systems are trouble free. I've never had one glich with them and I've spent months on the road using them for demo purposes on a multitude of rigs. I'm not going to say they are flawless because for sure they won't be.

Why?

Look at Apple. They build everything to spec. They fit a dedicated in spec FW controller and a dedicated USB controller etc... and they use the same one's in each range.

This means that the firms in question can write drivers to speak to those onboard controllers and it all just works because the is no variation to screw it up.

With PC's nobody uses in spec hardware at the low end. If you spend £400 on laptop I can promise that they will have a combo chip that controls USB/FW/Ethernet etc... and because of that they won't be in spec.

So all the sound card manufactures can do is design hardware that meets offical spec and hope it works. It isn't their fault if the laptop you bought isn't capable or working to an industry standard. That and we have to rely on a third party driver to make the OS work with shoddy controllers and whatever other random junk is in the average cheap pc these days I'm amazed any of them work to be honest.

Still if everyone didn't cut corners the wouldn't be any laptops on the market for under £1500

Going back to the Firewire example. It costs a couple of quid to fit a licenced TI chip to a board. It costs a couple of pence to fit an unbranded one from one of the other half dozen companies that knock out the sub-spec clones. As a laptop manufacture working to a price point, which do you fit when you know that 95% of the end users will never plug a cable into it?
tony tony chopper wrote: True that their drivers aren't the best (while their controller editor is really a model out there, their Tracktor F1 still won't work here), but NI isn't exactly mainstream, it targets a niche market whereas Creative is mainstream.
Exactly, we're talking about a tiny company here. Creative has thousands of staff, where Natives you could probably count on your fingers and toes at a push.
tony tony chopper wrote: I don't want anything but an X-Fi in my PC, and it's not for the hardware at all, it's because it has very solid, unbreakable drivers (important when programming), and fully multiclient on top of it.
I spat my coffee out here! RME has unbreakable drivers in a delivery pacakge under 5MB, Creative has a cluttered bloody intrusive mess. Nobody needs over a 100MB for an audio driver! I have my gaming guys bitch about Creative issues all day long, so the grass certainly isn't greener over there.
BertKoor wrote:
diggler wrote:Really you need an interface that isn't made in china that's all there is to it.
If you take an RME card and strip off all components made in China, what's left? An empty cardboard box printed in the EU maybe? :lol:
Errr... Designed and manufactured in Germany!

Yeah, your basic caps and whatever are Chinese/Japanese but the is more to it than just that.
AnalogGuy1 wrote:I'll call the Emperor's New Clothes out too on this one. I play in a band, using a high-end Sony Vaio Z's integrated soundcard (just the Intel one on the motherboard) and Asio4All. For my job I have access to a $650 Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus, and tried it out on my laptop. While I had no problems using the drivers, the latency was no different than using the internal soundcard, but what really surprised me was that I could not hear a difference in sound quality either. I'm sure if I connected one of our digital scopes I could find a difference in the noise floor, but it sure was not audible to me, and in the context of playing in a 5 piece rock band would never be noticed.

I can see an advantage to using an external audio interface if you need it for the hardware connections, but with a decent laptop I really don't see the need for it if you're just taking midi data in and sending stereo audio out.
Your Emperor has simply got the wrong clothes on as your missing the point of an good ASIO based interface!

I've worked with systems where the onboard is noisy with a terrible noise floor. I've worked with them where they are not and they sound great... all depends on the quality of the chip in the rig and as you've bought a decent laptop, no suprise it has a decent audio chip.

You Dac is just that, your changing the conversion path and the fact you can't hear a difference between that and the onboard convertor means you should be looking into the pointlessness of the DAC. I've never been one to get cought up in that whole convertor side of things as whilst it's nice to have nice figures to work with, the fact is a most converters out there these days are more sensitive than my hearing range is at this point.

What I do care about is performance. The DAC has nothing to do with this your ASIO driver does.

I care about being able to get a signal in and out of the interface as quickly as possible (to allow for real time monitoring whilst recording) and I care about the maximum track count it can process.

Grab this tool :http://www.oblique-audio.com/ and post up what your laptop can do in the terms of real time latency. Anything above 10us gets a bit patchy for people trying to play through it and monitor (drummers mostly but also guitarists once you hit 14us) and I'll be suprised if your laptop is hitting this. If it is I'll be amazed if your hitting it at anything other than a 32 buffer setting.

The RME units will hit it at a buffer setting of 64 and in some cases 128 with the overall track count difference between a setting of 32 and 128 will give you 30% - 40% more channels to work with before the processor craps out on you.

This is what your paying for in an interface. Drivers that give you a far higher channel count with a far better RTL result. Of course decent DACS are a must but that's a given in this kind of device.

If you just need midi and a stereo in&out then your right A4A using your onboard if it has a good noise floor is exactly what you need, but to write off a whole range of products because they are overkill for what you need is a bit short sighted.
Last edited by Kaine on Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

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diggler wrote:Really you need an interface that isn't made in china that's all there is to it.
I doubt it's that easy. You get the quality you pay for - even in China. The famous Firewire mixing desk Allen & Heath R16 is constructed in China and people still rave about that desk.

/C
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DrGonzo wrote:
diggler wrote:Really you need an interface that isn't made in china that's all there is to it.
I doubt it's that easy. You get the quality you pay for - even in China. The famous Firewire mixing desk Allen & Heath R16 is constructed in China and people still rave about that desk.

/C
Designed in the UK by a team with 40 years experience. Doesn't matter where it's built if you have someone over there over seeing the production line and ensuring it meets your standards, which I belive they do.

In fact a lot of companies do this now and thankfully in doing so, it has improved lot of kit on the market.

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Creative has a cluttered bloody intrusive mess.
The size or mess of their drivers (you don't need their GUIs for it to run btw) has nothing to do with the stability.
The problem with an X-fi is that you have to hunt for all the hidden effects to disable them, but it doesn't change that it's unbreakable, & multiclient (how many times have I read "I can't get anything else to play while ASIO is active".. well that's what you get with a "pro" soundcard).
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tony tony chopper wrote:
Creative has a cluttered bloody intrusive mess.
The size or mess of their drivers (you don't need their GUIs for it to run btw) has nothing to do with the stability.
The problem with an X-fi is that you have to hunt for all the hidden effects to disable them,
True, but how easy is it to turn off all that extra junk without installing the GUI?
tony tony chopper wrote: but it doesn't change that it's unbreakable, & multiclient (how many times have I read "I can't get anything else to play while ASIO is active".. well that's what you get with a "pro" soundcard).
Isn't that a feature of ASIO? It bypasses windows and gives the audio client direct access to the hardware. A good client will then give you the chance to allow other devices to access it (i.e. Cubase > release in background). Surely that's more down to having to use the implimented ASIO and the fact MS hasn't done a Apple and writen better native handling into the OS?

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AnalogGuy1 wrote: but what really surprised me was that I could not hear a difference in sound quality either. I'm sure if I connected one of our digital scopes I could find a difference in the noise floor, but it sure was not audible to me, and in the context of playing in a 5 piece rock band would never be noticed.
The difference in sound quality really depends on what you're connecting it to. If you connect a multi thousand dollar interface to a $20 boom box, of course you're not going to notice. What amp/speaker combo are you using? If the noise floor of the amp for the speakers is higher than the noise floor of either interface, then there you go.

Devon
Simple music philosophy - Those who can, make music. Those who can't, make excuses.
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Isn't that a feature of ASIO?
I don't know where in the chain the multicliency of the x-fi's ASIO's driver happens, but it works.
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I've done enough comparative tests with RMAA, and apart from the noise floor the difference between an old cheap onboard RealTek AC'97 and a proper audio interface are less than 0.3 dB in the 40 Hz - 15 kHz range, due to differences in their filters. Compared to frequency response specs of headphones & speakers, that's neglectible imho.
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For an accurate gauge of soundcard latency GearSlutz has an excellent benchmark thread and testing system that puts soundcards through real world tests.

Made in Germany means made in Germany even if the components come from Japan or China. Hopefully soon China is going down in the electronics market just have to boycott as much as possible. Why support a country that doesn't respect international copyright laws shame on them.

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-co ... se-13.html

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BertKoor wrote:I've done enough comparative tests with RMAA, and apart from the noise floor the difference between an old cheap onboard RealTek AC'97 and a proper audio interface are less than 0.3 dB in the 40 Hz - 15 kHz range, due to differences in their filters. Compared to frequency response specs of headphones & speakers, that's neglectible imho.
Here's the comparison I did between my Pulsar II, and Frontier Design cards back like 10 years ago that I still had on my webpage that I totally forgot about for reference. :)

Sound card comparison

Devon
Simple music philosophy - Those who can, make music. Those who can't, make excuses.
Read my VST reviews at Traxmusic!

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Kaine,
Kaine wrote:
AnalogGuy1 wrote:I'll call the Emperor's New Clothes out too on this one. I play in a band, using a high-end Sony Vaio Z's integrated soundcard and Asio4All. For my job I have access to a $650 Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus, and tried it out on my laptop. While I had no problems using the drivers, the latency was no different than using the internal soundcard, but what really surprised me was that I could not hear a difference in sound quality either...I can see an advantage to using an external audio interface if you need it for the hardware connections, but with a decent laptop I really don't see the need for it if you're just taking midi data in and sending stereo audio out.
Grab this tool :http://www.oblique-audio.com/ and post up what your laptop can do in the terms of real time latency. Anything above 10us gets a bit patchy for people trying to play through it and monitor (drummers mostly but also guitarists once you hit 14us) and I'll be suprised if your laptop is hitting this. If it is I'll be amazed if your hitting it at anything other than a 32 buffer setting.
Kaine, Thanks for the link; I've not heard of the RTL Utility before, but after seeing how it works I agree that it is exactly what is needed to determine latency. However, my results don't agree with your predictions; I get a sub-10ms latency using sample buffers well over 32 samples using nothing more than my laptop's integrated sound card and Asio4All. Image

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The utility is nice however, how does this translate to real world plugin latency the more plugins you use the less the Onboard sound can maintain at that low latency. Only way to truly determine is to run a benchmark test with your host.
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