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#1 digital interface

Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 11:48 am
by ed
had a bit of a waily yesterday...

I noticed that monitoring the midi input in the studio software had started behaving strangely....when hardware monitoring in idle the piano response was instantaneous but when in record mode there was a delay of 1/2 second between pressing a key and the sound emerging.

Investigating all the latency figures I couldn't find the culprit...
I reloaded all the drivers on the echo layla interface and there was no change....only one of the softsynths displayed this behaviour, but it was my goto piano and instrument synth so I was perplexed.....

anybody still with me?

so finally, swapped out the echo layla for a steinberg ur22 sound card with midi ports.....the problem went away
but my normal system latency of 1.7msec with the echo had turned into 11.6 msec with the steinberg and the overall input latency had risen to 16 msecs.

So the echo layla has finally failed.......waily waily.

the steinberg is usb2 which probably accounts for the rise in latency....
I think I'm looking for a replacement for the echo layla with a usb3 connection to keep the latency acceptable....

anybody any thoughts or experience???

In the past I would have put this up on the sonar/cakewalk forum but since cakewalk has sold out to bandlab I have no presence on their forum, and no bandlab software.

Oh waily waily.....more expense to paddle back to where I was in the first place...

#2 Re: digital interface

Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 12:33 pm
by The Stratmangler
Mangler Junior gets excellent results with the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 Gen3.
Latency is very low, but you'd expect that because his laptop does have a USB C connection.

#3 Re: digital interface

Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 1:32 pm
by ed
The Stratmangler wrote: Sun Apr 18, 2021 12:33 pm Mangler Junior gets excellent results with the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 Gen3.
Latency is very low, but you'd expect that because his laptop does have a USB C connection.
thanks Chris..I looked at that but had to scratch my head.....the spec says the interface is usbC but the protocol is usb2...I will look further at this cos it's a bit ambiguous.

Also it has more ins and outs than I need these days so maybe one of the lesser models...I assume they all have the same engines inside.

when you say latency is low, do you have figures?

#4 Re: digital interface

Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 1:40 pm
by The Stratmangler
Just had a word with Alex, and it's the standard USB A he's using.

I don't have any figures on the latency, but playing guitar through Amplitube feels great under the fingers, so very low indeed.
The separate PSU (ie not being powered by USB from the computer) might well have something to do with it.
The 8i6 is where Focusrite interfaces start to have a separate PSU.

#5 Re: digital interface

Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2021 10:36 am
by ed
thanks Chris

Panic over.
I uninstalled the echo and ran the ur22 for most of yesterday.
before pushing the button on a new interface I thought I'd check the echo one more time.
re-installed the echo with the latest driver(2011..go figure) and back to 1.5ms latency
midi latency back to normal...fully functional!

must have been a glitch...but it makes me nervous...
I'm keeping an eye on the interface market now...but what I want seems expensive, the offerings are all short of one component, presumably to force a sale at the top end....it's perm any 4 out of 5 or somesuch, but I want 5 and for that you have to go to the top offering.

After much digging around I've come to the conclusion that there is a bit of a scam with the current usb offerings...they offer usbc plugs but the interface is usb2 and not usb3. The more expensive ones now say USB3 in the spec.

The usbc/usb2 boxes can't match the echo/pci latency...and whether I can detect it or not, it always nags at me.

#6 Re: digital interface

Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2021 9:32 pm
by The Stratmangler
I'm pleased that normality has returned to Swift Towers :D