Question

I got a new Asus Xonar Essence One (Muses edition). It's a DAC with ASIO integrated, so I thought this would be better than my onboard sound card with ASIO4ALL.

Now the input delay of the Essence One is 20ms and I cannot set it lower in the ASIO settings (it is greyed out).

ASIO4ALL gets easily 8ms input latency. But why and how?

The lowest Device Block Size for the Essence One is 176 samples.

Is the device not capable of getting lower input latency? Is it because the signal has to travel from my midi keyboard to the pc and then to the dac? Is there any solution to this?

Answer 1

Oooops, I got it. There is the song sampling rate (was 44.1 kHz), the device block size and some arbitrary(?) sample count that the input latency is divided by.

For 44.1 kHz Asio4All is just as good as my DAC (while consuming more CPU I guess).

When going up to 96 kHz sampling rate, Asio4All becomes practically useless. But, and that's interesting, my DAC seems to be more efficient:

Device Block Size: 384 samples

Input Latency: 20.0 ms / 1920 samples = 0.01 ms

Output Latency: 40.0 ms / 3840 samples = 0.01 ms

...which is practically nothing.

Did I calculate that right?

Because I don't think a value like 0.02 ms roundtrip time seems realistic. When I slam on the drum pads of my MIDI controller, the sound from the pads reaches my ear slightly quicker than the sound in my headphones.