Rant #8776236712-L
Latency Bitches
You don't even know what latency is.
Oh, I forgot, you're a digital audio expert. You can squeeze 974 simultaneous tracks out of your cheap-ass IDE drive, the same one running your system and applications, no less. Plus 400 MIDI tracks of TR-707 samples. All playing at 240 BPM. And you have no latency.
Bullshit. You don't even know what latency is.
Understand that in the real world of the recording studio, latency doesn't exist. It's some stupid buzzword the creators of these host-based bullshit systems have rammed down your impressionable young throats. Audio (not sound) is electricity, and travels at virtually the speed of light. It instantaneously travels from the microphone to the preamp to the console to the patchbay to the compressor to the EQ back to the console to the amp...you get the picture. There is no latency in the real world of the traditional recording studio. Anyone who tries to tell you differently is dumb. The studio deals in electrons, not megahertz.
Latency is simply poor performance from a computer audio system that is 100% reliant on the host CPU to do everything from DSP to recording/playback media control to running the software and drawing the screen. Companies scurry like rats trying to hide that damned delay you hear between the time you play a note and the time your software figures out how spit it out.
In their digi001 toy, Digidesign goes so far as to give you a 'Low Latency Monitoring" menu item, which basically turns every caching scheme and half the DSP power off, just to get that delay down to a few milliseconds. Do you have any idea how long a time a few milliseconds is to a musician, especially a drummer? It's an eternity. It's no fun trying to perform when what you hear in the headphones reaches your ears a few milliseconds after it left your instrument.
People keep telling me that as computers get even faster, hardware-based digital audio will become obsolete, as the host will be able to match the performance of 'traditional' systems that have separate controllers for DSP, interface and disk control. All sorts of manufacturers are now advertising "zero-latency" systems. I have yet to see even the fastest host-based solution come close to the performance of even the oldest Pro Tools TDM system.
Even if they are out there...do any of them even sound good? That's another Rant entirely.
| ©2004 Paul Kurzweil |