Topic by groovy

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  • groovy
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Topic: Can the latency be too short?

Never thought, that I would acknowledge that question.

But today I had an Aha-effect. I'm testing another MIDI keyboard at the moment. All other parameters in my Laptop/Pianoteq environment were unchanged.

I noticed, that the sound appeared faster than with my older keyboard. The latency seemed to be shorter now, but to a point that it felt a little "too early"!

So I increased the latency in small steps. Start point was my usual buffer setting in qjackctl: buffersize 64, periods 2, samplefreq 44.1kHz. Then I increased the periods to 3 and to 4. In other words I played Pianoteq with three different nominal latencies:

a) 2.9 ms
b) 4.4 ms
c) 5.8 ms

To my surprise the middle latency (4.4 ms) felt just damn right! Most natural sync between tactile, mechanical feedback and piano tone.

My guess is that the older keyboard had another timing caused by the geometry of the keys/contacts OR slower key scanning OR a slower USB MIDI interface (non-exclusive OR).

Assuming the new keyboard has a shorter over-all latency, I can use bigger buffersizes now.

I have not measured the differences between the two MIDI keyboards so it is possible I'm just a victim of the placebo-effect.

Anyway, the immersion is amazingly better with that sync of tactile and audio latency.

cheers

Last edited by groovy (19-10-2020 21:44)

Reply by Qexl

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Re: Can the latency be too short?

Good observation and helpful notes groovy.

Absolutely if anyone hasn't tried what you described, it could be well worth it. For the sake of realism, it could be as important as a fitting velocity curve.

I like high latency numbers in Pianoteq for piano playing - PC/cable latency seems very low so I like to see 20ms in Pianoteq - and over time am fine with it for other music (like synths) too.

If anything some comfortable amount of extra latency and perceived "grand piano feel" has helped with musicality in my modern music types. Gives me a good neurological confirmation bias if this is set this way.

When playing some music requiring less kinetics, I find that it can be good to make the velocity curve a little quicker and play softer, rather than shortening latency.

Until I began to play piano, played some real grand pianos, got used to it, and coming from modern music in past years, I aimed for zero latency for some time in Pianoteq (can get 1.2ms)

Zero latency doesn't make sense to me, for physical piano playing.. that's some supposed baseline goal (since dawn of the MIDI age my music circles was awash with this talk). It was best for synth lines, bands and recording, playback and on - esp. simplistic pop lines and so on. But for solo piano, classical music etc. it's good to try different buffer sizes as groovy shows.

Would definitely encourage pianists to experiment with this - it can be a qualitative difference, in how realistic their dpiano feels.

Pianoteq Studio Bundle (Pro plus all instruments)  - Kawai MP11 digital piano - Yamaha HS8 monitors

Reply by johanibraaten

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Re: Can the latency be too short?

This is an interesting topic and I did a similar "discovery" as yours a while ago. I work as a piano teacher and this spring I was teaching online because of covid-19. I've always gone for lowest latency possible but this situation forced me to increase latency due to performance issues with my computer when streaming the sound through google meet and use webcams and other necessary programs at the same time. Surprisingly I found out that a latency around 5ms felt more "right" when playing with headphones and give me a more acoustic feel to the playing experience. The slightly higher latency also makes the keyboard feel a little heavier, especially when it comes to the percieved dynamic weight, which is something I've been wanting with my Yamaha N1. So I guess we are at a point where latency is no longer an issue.

Last edited by johanibraaten (20-10-2020 10:41)

Reply by sigasa

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Re: Can the latency be too short?

Yes, the timing is crucial. Some digital piano manufacturers such as Casio have cottoned on to this and use it in their boards

Warmest regards,

Chris