Studio Support Gnome wrote: ↑Thu Feb 19, 2026 12:46 am
This might not sound very helpful , but it IS intended to be ….
Sound travels at roughly 1 foot ( 300mm) per millisecond, a Round trip latency of about 9.5ms Is roughly equivalent to standing about 8-9 feet ( 2.5/6ish metres ) from the cab while playing electric guitar.
If you can’t play in time with a drummer from 2.5 metres away you’ve got bigger problems than your interface.
People get too tied up with ultimate low latency specs, and not enough with reality.
In real terms , until your round trip is approaching 100ms I would not entertain the notion of blaming the latency for timing inaccuracy.
Lord help you on a festival stage if it’s that much of a problem.
Forget the spec , focus on the performance.
Are we talking about live situations or in studio. I have been a musician for 30 years. I have played with many highly skilled musicians in Los Angeles. I'm not talking about live situations. I really would have liked to hear you play in a studio with 100 ms latency.
Studio Support Gnome wrote: ↑Thu Feb 19, 2026 12:46 am
This might not sound very helpful , but it IS intended to be ….
Sound travels at roughly 1 foot ( 300mm) per millisecond, a Round trip latency of about 9.5ms Is roughly equivalent to standing about 8-9 feet ( 2.5/6ish metres ) from the cab while playing electric guitar.
If you can’t play in time with a drummer from 2.5 metres away you’ve got bigger problems than your interface.
People get too tied up with ultimate low latency specs, and not enough with reality.
In real terms , until your round trip is approaching 100ms I would not entertain the notion of blaming the latency for timing inaccuracy.
Lord help you on a festival stage if it’s that much of a problem.
Forget the spec , focus on the performance.
Are we talking about live situations or in studio. I have been a musician for 30 years. I have played with many highly skilled musicians in Los Angeles live. I'm not talking about live situations. I really would have liked to hear you play in a studio with 100 ms latency.
Studio Support Gnome wrote: ↑Thu Feb 19, 2026 12:46 am
This might not sound very helpful , but it IS intended to be ….
Sound travels at roughly 1 foot ( 300mm) per millisecond, a Round trip latency of about 9.5ms Is roughly equivalent to standing about 8-9 feet ( 2.5/6ish metres ) from the cab while playing electric guitar.
If you can’t play in time with a drummer from 2.5 metres away you’ve got bigger problems than your interface.
People get too tied up with ultimate low latency specs, and not enough with reality. Le notion of blaming the latency for timing inaccuracy.
Lord help you on a festival stage if it’s that much of a problem.
Forget the spec , focus on the performance.
I think the acoustic distance argument is flawed- performance is the key here. The acoustic distance argument falls apart because live scenarios (like jamming with a drummer 2.6m away) add symmetric delay to both sounds, keeping them in sync. DAW monitoring latency hits only your VST instrument’s feedback, creating an action-to-sound mismatch that musicians detect way below 9.5ms. As evidenced by other people's experience above.
Trained ears pick up keystroke-to-tone delays around 100ms on average, in studies on auditory-motor coupling such as this one. Guitarists feel VST disruption at 5-10ms in practice.
Exactly my point. But some musicians have perhaps never even had to worry about the equipment in a studio or have never been in a studio. We are not talking about live performance. Some need to understand that there is a major difference between live and studio.
TurtleDaze wrote: ↑Sat Feb 21, 2026 5:13 pm
Are you serious when you say that you don't care about latency and you only focus on your performance?
I did not say I "don't care". I said "focus on". To me "focus on" is quite different to "don't care". I dunno, did you intend to quote me there, or someone else? Because when you said that, you quoted my post that re-iterated the earlier post you agreed with?
TurtleDaze wrote: ↑Sat Feb 21, 2026 5:13 pm
Are you serious when you say that you don't care about latency and you only focus on your performance?
I did not say I "don't care". I said "focus on". To me "focus on" is quite different to "don't care". I dunno, did you intend to quote me there, or someone else? Because when you said that, you quoted my post that re-iterated the earlier post you agreed with?
What I mean is that I would not be proud of my performance if I had 100 ms latency in a studio session. But I do not have to worry about that in a professional studio cause they would never expect anyone to play with more than 5ms latency. My issue is that a latency close to 10ms is too much for me. This is what everyone in pro studios are very aware of. You can check with any pro studio or any pro studio musican. This is no news. But in live situations it's a totally different matter. We are all different and perhaps we just need to accept that some musicians notice latency and some don't. Not saying that one is better than the other.
Thanks for elaborating on your extensive pro experience, and it's clear you've handled challenging setups successfully. I agree that focusing on performance over specs is solid advice.
Without dismissing that let me clarify the distinction I am making: live acoustic delays (e.g., 2.5m to drummer) affect *all* sounds symmetrically, preserving phase relationships between your action and others' sounds. In DAW monitoring, latency delays *only* your own processed feedback (e.g., VST guitar effects), creating an asymmetric action-to-perceived-sound mismatch.
Scientific studies confirm that musicians (as distinct from non-musicians) detect delays around 10ms routinely. Anecdotaly (well it's discussed a lot on forums, so could be a strong basis for an actual study) pros target <5ms for their setups. I agree with you- that is no news as you said .
I had an interesting experience pertaining to this when I was at Eddy Deegan's last month. We were monitoring my guitar through the DAW. Initially I had no issue with it when I was sitting away from the monitors. However when I later moved closer to the speaker I became aware of the latency - it was around 10mS.
There's definitely some sort of visual cue going on in relation to our perception of sound delays - in the initial state brain is going "we're away from the sound source, adjust perception accordingly" and in the later state it's "we're right next to the sound source, why the hell is there a delay?"
If you are recording guitar using amp sim plug-ins, then if you are also using monitors with DSP for monitoring (rather than headphones), then it could be worth having a second set of all-analogue monitors for use when recording guitar.
The monitors might only add a small amount of latency themselves (e.g. KH80 DSPs are 2ms), but added to the interface and computer RTL, it could be enough to push the latency from natural/playable to noticeable/unplayable. There’s a very tight cutoff between the two.
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