Confused about latency and drivers

[D_13]

I just bought a new Toshiba laptop and because I play soft synths live I've been experimenting with trying to get the lowest latency I can with the least drop outs. I use an M-Audio Fast Track Pro with the Windows 7 64bit drivers and got an output latency of around 6-7ms without crackles which I was quite happy with. However I used Asio4All with the Realtek built in audio and using pull WavesRT mode (I think) in the Asio4all settings I got down to around 3.6ms latency with a buffer value of 128 and no crackles playing U-he's Ace synth (aside from the more monstrous patches this synth is capable of which brought the laptop to its knees!) Seems odd though that the Fast track which is designed for audio can't operate at the same latency as the internal. Does anyone have any idea why this might be?

[purplesnet]

It might be because asio4all is not showing you the real latency. It's giving you it's best guess, and there
might be any amount of extra latency added on top of that by your sound card drivers. I would suggest
doing the latency compensation test that you can find from live's help. That will show the real latency
you are getting from the internal sound card.

[jerry123]

My Suggestion is to use the M-Audio interface with the ASIO4ALL driver.
Should get better results that way.

[smaucher]

My Suggestion is to use the M-Audio interface with the ASIO4ALL driver.
Should get better results that way.

+1

[leedsquietman]

64 bit win7 drivers are still very young and almost beta like in many cases. M-Audio don't have the best reputation with audio drivers in general (although they seem to have improved in the last 18 months or so). You have to remember that one advantage of running a 7 year old o/s like XP Pro, is that developers have had ages to write, test, refine, retest, refine audio drivers etc. For example Echo Audio refined the driver on the Indigo I/O more than a dozen times and took latency down (running Reason or Cubase) 256 samples required for basic functioning to 96 samples by the time of the last revision on my computer. CPU overhead got improved on almost every release too.

Windows 7 is not designed (in spite of HP and Dr; Dre's ridiculous commercial) as a DAW specific power upgrade. Most windows users are gamers or office suite users. Most pro recording studios run Macs and Microsoft seem to have weakly surrendered this niche. Yes it has many things which will improve functionality such as handling multi core processors and addressing memory more efficiently, but there are no changes to how it works with audio, no change to how it works with MIDI (no MIDI changes since Win 98 in fact). It's a good upgrade, but could have been better for what is considered the 'niche' market of pro audio.

Your drivers should get better with time, in the meantime, ASIO4ALL is a good option.