All About Latency, Pt. 2

In this series, we’re discussing the topic of latency in recording systems. Making sure this is set up correctly is really important when it comes to making your home recording experience easy and painless.

Using input and output audio buffers to adjust latency

Your Digital Audio Workstation contains two buffers that you should use as the first tool in adjusting latency. They look like this:

Audio buffers in Ableton

Audio buffers in Logic

Your first step if you’re noticing latency problems (detailed further in Part 1 of this series), is to adjust your input and output audio buffers in your DAW’s audio settings. Try to get your round trip latency no higher than 50ms, ideally in the 10-25ms range.

As you decrease the buffer size, latency will drop. Increase the buffer size and latency increases.

Finding the correct buffer settings

If your audio buffers are set too low, you’ll get nasty sounding digital artifacts and distortions ruining your recordings, as the CPU and software do the audio equivalent of “dropping frames”.

If they’re set too high, you’ll hear noticable delay effects during recording and/or playback.

We want it set just right, so the system has a large enough cache to process audio smoothly, but not so high as to cause an audible delay in the processed audio.

Too much versus too little latency

So, exactly how much latency is too much?

We measure latency in milliseconds (ms). There are 1000 millseconds in 1 second.

Any delay of under 10 ms will generally be imperceptible to your human ears.

Meaning, two handclaps offset by less than 10 ms from each other will appear to sound as a single handclap.

A delay starts to be more noticeable to humans between 10-30 ms of separation, depending on the individual.

By the time we get to around 50 ms, you will start to hear a clearly noticeable delay or echo effect.

Most guitar pedals and analog studio delays that are meant to sound like a noticeable echo or delay have their very fastest settings tuned to around 60 ms.

Optimal latency in milliseconds

Ideally, we’re looking for a roundtrip latency through the system of between 10-25 ms, with an upper bound of about 50 ms if you can’t get it quite that low. Try to get it as low as possible, without causing distortion artifacts.