[Ardour-Users] Another newbie Question: Anyone having experiences with following setup: Ardour, Jack, Linux, Lexicon Omega (or other USB1-device) ?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:28:47 -0600, Chris Caudle wrote:
>You should be listening to the new audio you play using the hardware
>monitoring of the Lexicon, so that there is not an additional in and
>out delay of what you play.  That is really the only time that latency
>matters for multitrack recording, if your audio interface does not
>support hardware monitoring and you have to monitor what you play by
>sending to jackd, then jackd sends back to the hardware output.  In
>that case the additional 20ms of delay compared to when you hit a key
>or pluck a string may be annoying.  Should not apply to your Lexicon.

Some musicians and audio engineers are still using a mixing console ;).
Alternatively to an audio device monitoring feature a mixing console
could be used.

FWIW musicians, e.g. guitarists using digital stompboxes, might want to
add the digital stompboxes' latencies to the latency compensation.
My recommendation is to use analog stompboxes, since they sound
much better. However, a lot of people disagree with my taste, so those
digital stompbox users should be aware that a digital stompbox has got
a latency, too. IOW the latency chain that needs to be compensated not
necessarily just is the round-trip latency from audio card output +
audio card input.

There are often claims that low latencies don't matter, this is true,
but a chain of low latencies easily becomes a long latency, that does
matter a lot.

It's funny that people care about opto-coupler delay when playing MIDI
devices by MIDI thru chains, but at the same time they don't care about
the enormously longer delay of the audio signal added by digital
stompboxes ;).

Regards,
Ralf