On Latency:

The only problem I've had with Pianoteq, is when playing at the keyboard or playing a midi file in real time; I was hearing fairly frequent "clicks".

With an EMU 1820M S/C and a fairly fast dual core AMD, using ASIO, I set the latency to 5 ms because that's what I had heard that was needed for live playing or the delay between pressing a key and the issuance of sound would be annoying.

However, the clicks became more annoying with time, so I asked the guys on Multimedia Production Forums for help.  After checking everything out with the computer, one fellow suggested that 5 ms simply wasn't required and gave some convincing evidence.

So I set my ASIO latency to 20 ms.  I could not discern any delay at all (and the clicks disappeared).  I'm tempted to set it at the next available setting (50) to see what happens.

On this forum, I have notices many people are concerned with having very low latency with Pianoteq.  I have looked at a diagram in the lecture series (http://www.speech.kth.se/music/5_lectur...asure.html) and saw there was about 30ms measured between the time a person touches a key and a sound comes out of the piano that was tested in the article.  If I read the graph correctly, I was wondering if someone might help me understand how a desired low latency on an electronic instrument compares with the latency of a real piano?  I have noticed some people are trying to achieve less than 5ms latency with Pianoteq and not achieving this can be an issue.  Do people who want very low latency with Pianoteq desire this because it makes things easier in the electronic world with other synthesized sounds or are they trying to more closely approximate a real piano?  Is this more a personal preference kind of issue?  I am asking this question out of curiosity.  I am just trying to get a little smarter on the subject as I have limited background with this..  Not sure if this was the right place to make this post or if it should have been in one of the other threads.  Thanks.

http://www.speech.kth.se/music/5_lectures/contents.html

The first lecture is by itself wonderful--The pages include photographs of Cristofori's piano and a replacement soundboard, and a series of pictures of an experiment in which a sand-like substance was poured on a soundboard (of a unstrung piano) that was then vibrated at its various modes so that the "sand" reveals the vibrating areas. And all of the lectures offer much more information than I can claim to fully understand.