> if i read this correctly, it's about latency wrt _another_player_. all > trained ensemble musicians are easily able to compensate for the rather > long delays that occur on normal stages. not *hearing_oneself_in_time* > is a completely different thing. if i try to groove on a softsynth, 10 > ms response time feels ugly on the verge of unusable (provided my > calculations and measurements on latency are correct), and i'm not even > very good.
Well, I just did some guitar playing through my boss gx700 with various delay settings. Indeed 10ms delay is noticable, but I wouldn't go as far as ugly/unusable. You could just feel there was a slight delay. But really anything below 10ms is realtime. I don't think a 5ms delay is a problem for playing any instrument. I don't know if the gx700 (or effect units in general) has an additional delay from adc/dac or the way it processes. > let a drummer play an electronic trigger that does not make any sound by > itself, and feed him a triggered synth drum over his headphones with 5 > ms latency, and he will kill you. his/her body control will be off to > hell in a handbasket if the actual motion and the sound are not totally > in sync, which means the drumtrack will be garbage and the drummer will > suffer from increased muscular strain. This already happens with 5ms?? > as some people mentioned, some instruments have a long "natural" > latency, so the players have learnt to compensate, and the latency is > part of the "feel". but then, this is not true for most percussive or > plucked instruments. Indeed when playing pads on a synth it would be hard to even notice a 40ms delay. I once read somewhere that some digital mixers have a 6ms delay. --martijn
