Laptop currently has conexant ISST drivers. It’s a HP Zbook, very high end for doing video work, Xeon processors, lots of RAM, dedicated GPU, etc…
So I suspect that the overall computer specs are doing the heavy lifting and if I do get latency improvement it will be minimal.
But to @dhj 's point… yes sound quality and… IMHO… the ability to output balanced analog signals when distributing audio live are reasons to get an interface.
Thanks everyone for the input… this answers all my newbie Gig Performer interface questions and adds plenty of food for thought.
I probably will repost some of that question I put on Gearsluz here.
Forums take a while to ‘get to know’. Actually Gearslutz is where I heard about Gig Performer, via a reference to Cantible and I guess I thought there would be a lot of VST heads on there but point well taken.
I wanted to revisit this because I did purchase an interface, a MOTU M4, which I like in general but I am noticing something unfortunate.
Before I had an interface, I could drive my CPU % quite high before I would get any dropouts, like near 100%, just using the internal windows audio drivers. Now with the MOTU and AISO drivers, set at 512 samples and without “use lowest latency safety offsets” selected, I get dropouts with cpu usage much lower and with just a few VSTs engaged while playing about 8 notes at a time.
While I appreciate the balanced outputs and integrated midi interface, not so sure I have improved my situation. Can anyone shed light on this?
Also I tested latency, could get very low latency ~2.4 ms if I was down around 32 or 64 samples, and round trip latency around ~ 5.6 ms but I basically could only use a single VST at a time with those settings.
I do return audio from a keyboard into my setup so RT is important. Not sure how to strike a balance here.
I had (still have but don’t use anymore) a Motu M2 and when i used this the first time, i wondered about the very coarse settings options of their driver (on Windows), so with all of my other audio interfaces i had before the Motu, i used buffer settings of 128 or lower, which caused the Motu to produce permanent dropouts and crackle, so i had to increase the buffer size for the Motu to at least 256, but the strange thing is, i couldn’t notice any loss of responsiveness when i was playing keyboards - ok, i am surely not the fastest player, but the sound alwys was there when i hit a key, and also by playing guitar the latency with the Motu on a buffer of 256 felt absolutely ok.
So i guess, maybe the buffer size which a driver offers, might eventually not reflect the actual behaviour of the latency, when compared to other audio interfaces/drivers…
BTW: At the moment i use a little Focusrite Scarlett Solo which works pretty well too (i bought it, because it is smaller) and it also has balanced line outs (but the little one lacks the 5-pin Midi sockets).
I would say, as long as you don’t really feel any disadvantages with the higher buffer settings, just don’t care about the values and use what is working…
And what about the latency you had with the windows audio drivers without audio interface? From my own experience, it is close to unplayable (more than 10ms).
@David-san I couldn’t measure it because I had no input back to the computer only an output but it was very fast IMO… no noticeable issues.
@schamass Thanks for your perspective, I agree that even set to 512 I don’t really feel an issue with the M4.
@dhj Does lowering the sample rate allow you to lower the buffer and is there a disadvantage to lowering sample rate (dithering?). Are the plugins operating at whatever sample rate the interface is set to or do they operate at a native rate of 48kHz?
The plugins must run at whatever sample rate you’ve set.
You can lower or raise the buffer size independently of the sample rate. The trade off is quality vs latency vs glitching (the last happening if your sample rate is too high or your buffer size is too low so that the cpu can’t keep up). Personally, I’ve never found any reason to go higher than 44.1k nor buffer lower than 256. If your stuff is very percussive then maybe 128
