I agree, Phil, that the “6 msec is not usable” is not a realistic statement. First, the brain anticipates. Humans are incredible good at throwing things, for instance. (In a few minutes, I’m heading out to play basketball and drain some “threes”.) And the brain needs to tell the hand to release the baseball, or flick the wrist to launch the basketball, *way* before the hand is in position. Yet the accuracy with which we do it is amazing. We fall far short of the big cats in speed, and the strength of other primates even half our size, but boy can we bean something with a rock 100 feet away like no other critter on the planet. So the brain is pretty good about anticipatory timing.
If you’re in a living room or garage, x feet from the drummer, y feet from the bass cabinet, and z feet from your leslie, you can still cope. Then it’s a little different thing to play solo. I already mentioned about the huge delay I had to get used to with the big pipe organ. It was bad, but it sure would have been horrible to play piano that way (easy enough simulated with a delay line and piano plug-in). When I’m recording via Ivory, say, I’ve got headphones, and I want a 64-sample buffer. 128 is reasonable. Beyond that, I quickly arrive at the point when I lose the sense of connection between my fingers and the instrument, and at minimum my comfort level suffers. If there were no alternative, I’d get used to it, but it’s not optimal. But “unusable” is a bit extreme. On Jun 21, 2014, at 4:29 PM, Phil Burk <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 6/21/14, 8:09 AM, Rich Breen wrote: >> 5 msec becomes very noticable on headphones, and above >> 6 msec is not usable. > > Note that the speed of sound in air is roughly 1125 feet/second. So if a > guitar player is more than 7 feet from their amp then they will have more > than 6 msec of latency. > > For acoustic instrument players the speed of sound is not an issue. But if an > electronic musician is looking for ultra-low latency then they must also > consider their distance from the loudspeaker. > > Phil Burk -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
