[Lcjones]

Hey Folks,

These is my very simplistic thoughts on "Latency".

Home recording and latency has been brought up and I thought I'd add to the collective.

Let me also add, I'm just learning home recording, so I am by no means an expert by any stretch. I'm sure others here have quite a bit more experience than I, but I'll part with what I know. So all you old timers be sure to chime in!!!! And please be sure to correct me!!!!!

Back in the day, before digital recording, latency wasn't a real problem. It was all analog. No processors or memory or hard drives to deal with all that input. On the other hand, editing tape be hand is an extremely tedious job. A snip here and a splice there, glue it up and hope like the devil you got it right. ( Those folks are the masters and seriously dedicated to sound! )

Latency is time it takes for sound to come into (input) the recording device and back out (output). It has everything to do with the power of your machine and hard drive speed and disk space.

Remember that when recording, what is being input is also being written to the hard drive at the same time. So the slower a hard drive is i.e., a 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM vs 10,000 RPM, the more likely latency will creep in. At the same time, if the HD is quite full, the "seek time" required to write to the disk is longer... more latency.

Processor speed and the amount of ram is also included in latency. If you're doing home recording, this is one instance where more is better! More processor and more memory. You just can't have enough! Even if you can't upgrade a processor, you should be able to add ram, so get as much as you can.

Lets take a look at your equipment:
What type (speed) of processor?
The amount of ram?
Hard disk size and available space?

Also, if you have a fairly new machine and feel you have enough memory, check hard drive performance. If you're running a Windows machiine, be sure to run Disk Defrag on a routine schedule. Defrag will help decrease seektime during writing.

You want to be sure your sound card has the lastest drivers available. One thing to keep in mind to. If you have an on-board soundcard it is more than likely "sharing" your base memory. In other words if your machine has 256 MB of memory and your on-board sound card requires 16 MB to operate, that 16MB less power you have to process the input. And if you have on-board sound, you probably have on-board video and that too is eating up memory.

This is the first place I'd start looking for latency issues. Adding a mixing console or any external piece is not going to help latency if you don't have the power to back it up.

My system is a 3.4Ghz proc, 1Gb mem and 80GB HD. and I've just ordered another 80Gb HD to keep my recording seperate from my everyday tools.

Hope this helps! I'm sure others can get into greater detail, so feel free to chime in!

Les