The Latency Dilemma

Among many beginners in the Field of Audio, Latency has always been a lingering concern. Latency, also commonly referred to, as Monitoring Delay can be simply understood as the Lag of Audio that occurs between Audio/MIDI going into your system and the Audio coming out of it. For example, when you connect your Guitar, Microphone, and Keyboard etc. in your Computer. It goes through various stages. These multiple stages make it inevitable for Audio to delay them, just like a Car trying to get from Point A to B with traffic signals in between. The Cumulative fallout of this process, often results in the phenomenon experiencing audio to be ‘slightly Behind’ what you intended to hear.

Latency in a Nutshell

Since we’ve identified what the problem is, I wanted to know more about whether there was a way to work around it. Whether I was satisfied with the answers or not, I learnt more about how the problem occurs. While working with any Digital recording system, there will always be a Analogue-Digital or Digital-Analogue converter. By default these hardware’s produce a delay within what they carry since the Process of Converting it is time-consuming. This works by trying to duplicate the Audio into a digital representation, i.e. Analogue to Digital, while the Reverse includes converting Binary Digits into Flowing Voltage, or analogue signal. Usually, A-D and D-A converters do cause delay, but the extent of it is very minimal. The Delay produced by these converters is around 5 Milliseconds and generally goes unnoticed. Many Digital Multi-track Mixers produce very less delay, all-coming from its D-A converter. However, the consequences of Delay should not be taken lightly. If musicians were to hear themselves through a PA system instead of Headphones, there would be tons of spills into their microphones. If the same were being played via a Digital Mixer or recorder it would result in Comb Filtering between the spill and the sound from the direct source.

Latency from a Microphone to Headphones

Latency can also be mess while working with software synths. Since the Audio Produced is merely by the computer it is impossible to make any tweaks with the help of an analogue mixer. The only logical way to work around this would be to reduce your buffer size in an attempt to decrease the delay between pressed key on the keyboard and the output coming off the synth. To work better with lesser buffer sizes, it would also be handy to experiment with various setting on your DAW and soft synth. An easy demonstration of this would be enabling you’re a sample-based synth to load samples into the RAM instead of streaming them directly from the hard disk to provide for less glitch Audio. While there is no fixed solution to Solve the Latency Dilemma are many Ways to Work around or Try to avoid its dire consequences, So work with what you got and make the most of it!

References:

Inglis, S. (2007, June 1). Living with Latency. Soundonsound.