Latency Question

[Kooplah]

I was reading that the 400 was having latency problems for Windows users, but that there would some sort of new firmware, or update from Vestax to fix this. Is that available and does it conflict at all the the Ean Golden firmware?
I am thinking about getting one of these but I am a Windows user, so anyone have advice on whether i should do it or go for S2 and F1 when it comes out.
Haha also anyone know if the F1 will be able to have a page mapped to some thing Midi Fighers Instant Grat? Cause that would be super dope

[Thiefsie]

It's working fine on my Windows 7 at home, I think around 60ms latency. (EGE Edition) My guess is that the EGE is updated to the current Vestax firmware as a base?

I only hope that the EGE is quickly updated to the new firmware when the external mixing update comes through.

[Funky B]

I've got windows 7 down to 39ms with dpc latency checker and drivers from laptopvideo2go.com (use at your own risk) with my EGE. 39ms is too much latency but I'm planning on picking up a MacBook pro when the refresh should happen in a few months. What are Mac users able to obtain for latency with their 400s?

[Mag]

I have 10ms latency (standard/256) on Win7 with a dual 2ghz Core1 laptop. This allows me to have all 4 tracks going and every fx channel on and filter on.. which i would never actually do in reality so maybe I'll gi back to the drivers and reduce the latency at some point.

This is on a stock 400

Win 7 sp1 has an important fix for usb audio and cpu usage - though most people have that by now.

[Funky B]

10ms and below is the magic number for me. If I could get down that low I'd keep my computer for another 5 years...

[Mag]

10ms and below is the magic number for me. If I could get down that low I'd keep my computer for another 5 years...

How fast is your pc? Mine is 5 years old but I had to blow a whole lot of dust out of the heat sink and put it on variable cpu speed to allow it to be cool enough to run the vci with 10ms latency.

While variable cpu speed seems counter intuitive forcing it to go 100% clock all the time overheated it and the bios kept cutting the cpu speed to 700mhz to cool it down - which of course just resulted in overruns and horrible sound and me thinking i needed gigantic buffer sizes.

A lot of dust builds up in them over 5 years so they do get harder to keep running at original spec.

What buffer settings are you using in the driver?

[Skerrplunk]

I also have questions about the latency but am a Mac user. I have a new (within 1 year) fully loaded MBP. What do any MBP users have their overall latency set at?

[Funky B]

I was able to get set the buffer size down to 256 samples today without any artifacts! This got me down to 21.8 ms of latency which is useable.
Processor speed does not translate to latency. Hardware, software and and how the hardware talks to the os (driver) all determine the lowest useable buffer size.

[Mag]

What is your USB Streaming Mode set to?

I get 21.8 ms with 256 samples and "Safe" for the streaming mode.

"Safe" is the default i think but lower options have a big impact on latency.

[Funky B]

For my post above I was set on safe. I had a chance to play around with the different modes today and ended with some great results. Minimum latency gives an output of 1ms and introduces lots of small artifacts on slow drags. Minimum gives me a final latency of 6.8ms and would not be usable on any signifigantly amplified system or recording but you can mess around with it. Low and standard bring me down to 7.8 and 9.8ms and have very similar results for me. On slow drags I would get artifacts on a rare occasion but nobody would ever notice this at the club (I remember playing vinyl on large systems that sounded much worse than this.) I was so happy with the low setting that I didn't bother checking relaxed or extra safe. I assume both introduce more latency with less artifacts. With the low setting scratching is possible (s4 is better but you can scratch on the 400.) These settings show off the vci-400s studio grade USB streaming mode and how it offers more headroom and more flexibility. Big kudos to Vestax for developing such a great controller!