Sascha Franck
Rock Star
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- 7,307
I always think the acoustic latency comparison to digital latency is irrelevant really.
A few meters of acoustic latency is generally way less disruptive to playing feel compared to digital processing latency, and acoustic latency is what our ears are used to dealing with - it's natural.
AD/DA is like playing through a delay pedal on a short delay time that has no dry signal (fully wet), and the other is like playing in a room that has some nice natural ambience.
Or in other words: If you were to play guitar into an interface that was setup with a buffer of 512 or 1024 or something. it's basically like having a short delay pedal. That is never how it feels or sounds if standing several meters from an amp, of any kind.
I basically agree (and this is also why you can partially mask digital latency by adding some kinda ambience), but as usual, it totally depends. For instance, when playing open air, there's very little (if any at all) audible clues to "help you explain" the latency of your cab standing a few meters away. It's pretty much comparable to what digital latency is doing.
Besides, for almost aeons, people were never thinking about latency. Or does anyone remember any latency related discussions when it was about their Boss DD pedals (and whatever else) almost decades back? Most of them had no analog dry through, either.
As said, I'm pretty anal about latency, that's why I measure pretty much all of my guitar devices and interfaces carefully, but IMO, unless you're Steve Vai or Donald Fagen, there's always a certain point when you can just let go and accept things.
In general, it's however still clever to start with the lowest possible latency numbers as you may run into situations adding latency beyond your influence (especially live and even more so once there's some digital IEM solutions provided), which may as well tip you across a certain tolerance area (which, fwiw, is vastly different from person to person).