As a hobbyist musician, the more you externalise these sorts of things, the more latency you create. A discreet, internal, soundcard is probably going to trump external DACs for a long time to come.
External DACs totally have their place, music playback, movies/shows. But for doing audio work, internal is the way to go.
As a professional musician and someone who works for a prominent Japanese electronic musical instrument company, I’m going to have to disagree.
Thunderbolt provides all the low latency of a PCIe interface with none of the drawbacks. I use an Antelope Zen Tour in my home studio and it is just amazing.
The systems I designed for work though use RME PCIe cards, but those systems aren’t in the hobbyist space.
I absolutely notice when a game defaults to a resolution with 60hz refresh rate. It’s not even so much a stutter or stall as it just feels “off” and then feels “normal” if I adjust the settings to 144hz.
Though I don’t notice this when playing a game that has fps capped to 60, as long as the monitor is refreshing at 144hz still.
I’ve also had a few ms of latency adjustment make the difference between frequently missing notes and being able to sustain long combos in guitar hero or similar rhythm games.
It’s subtle to the point where it’s difficult to measure objectively (if it’s even possible to measure something where subjectivity is built in like sensory processing), but based on those I think our temporal resolution is higher than 60 fps in certain cases.
Edit: Though I’m not sure I agree that the latency difference between an internal and external sound card will be very noticeable. I used a USB dual pre for gaming for years and never noticed anything off with it. I might try breaking it out again to see if it makes a difference in rhythm games.
Just buy an external DAC
As a hobbyist musician, the more you externalise these sorts of things, the more latency you create. A discreet, internal, soundcard is probably going to trump external DACs for a long time to come.
External DACs totally have their place, music playback, movies/shows. But for doing audio work, internal is the way to go.
As a professional musician and someone who works for a prominent Japanese electronic musical instrument company, I’m going to have to disagree.
Thunderbolt provides all the low latency of a PCIe interface with none of the drawbacks. I use an Antelope Zen Tour in my home studio and it is just amazing.
The systems I designed for work though use RME PCIe cards, but those systems aren’t in the hobbyist space.
👌👍 latency 🤣
You people just make shit up. The human eye can’t see above 60fps!
Imagine believing you are going to notice .001 poling rate. Maybe we can get a dac that fully saturates a pciex16 lane
That’s true until you get into VR. Then 90fps seems to be the threshold.
I’ll leave the rest to the audiophiles.
What do eyes and frames per second have to do with audio latency?
I absolutely notice when a game defaults to a resolution with 60hz refresh rate. It’s not even so much a stutter or stall as it just feels “off” and then feels “normal” if I adjust the settings to 144hz.
Though I don’t notice this when playing a game that has fps capped to 60, as long as the monitor is refreshing at 144hz still.
I’ve also had a few ms of latency adjustment make the difference between frequently missing notes and being able to sustain long combos in guitar hero or similar rhythm games.
It’s subtle to the point where it’s difficult to measure objectively (if it’s even possible to measure something where subjectivity is built in like sensory processing), but based on those I think our temporal resolution is higher than 60 fps in certain cases.
Edit: Though I’m not sure I agree that the latency difference between an internal and external sound card will be very noticeable. I used a USB dual pre for gaming for years and never noticed anything off with it. I might try breaking it out again to see if it makes a difference in rhythm games.
What card are you using? Does it have an external breakout box?
Last one I used was the delta 10/10 which I loved
It’s an older Creative card, still has plenty of oomph. It had a breakout box. Lord knows where it is.