Latency (min 512) with KDP-120, AMD Ryzen 5 3300, 16GB, SMSL DAC/AMP

The SMSL C200 does indeed look like a nice device for the price. However, as far as I can tell, it is mainly marketed for audiophile type use (home hi-fi, or headphone listening to recorded sources). I understand that market well, and the users don't care about latency. So the DACs that are sold for that purpose tend to use algorithms that take longer. Who cares if your music is playing 200 ms behind--a hi-fi user will never complain. I looked for specs on the latency of the SMSL and couldn't easily find them. But I know that the hi-fi DACs I own have terrible latency and are not usable for piano playing.

By contrast, an audio interface (such as the Focusrite Scarlett series that I use, and many others) make latency a top priority. Latency on the Scarlett series is around 5-10ms (that doesn't mean your total latency is that low--since it is just one part). A audio interface is in the same price range as your SMSL, and also contains a very good headphone amp and DAC. I doubt that your keyboard and computer are to blame--unless you are perhaps trying to use wireless midi or something. That's why I'd bet that the SMSL is the problem.

Thanks. I will try out a Scarlet. But the headphone out of those devices isn´t really good. Maybe it´s chenged for the 4th Gen.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/foru...iew.10187/
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/foru...iew.15757/

The thing aout the M4 is, it costs 300 Euro in Europe. But maybe that  is what I´m going to try.

How does the sample rate of 512 relate to the audio interface? Is it a driver issue?

Start by downloading and installing Latency Monitor, assuming you are running Windows.

https://resplendence.com/latencymon

This application will indicate who the culprit is that's interrupting Pianoteq because its purpose is to show what's causing issues with audio.

You start Latency Monitor first then set it to scan while you play your digital piano normally through Pianoteq.

When a stutter or one of those annoying big pauses occurrs, the software will display a red line with information on what is causing the problem.

With that information in hand, you can then attempt to eliminate it.

The biggest culprits I found were:

Dell's noisy Support Agent and accompanying services.

I stopped the services for Support Agent and I had fewer issues afterwards on one machine but additional issues on another.

Recently, I set up a dedicated hand-me-down Dell desktop running Windows 10 and gave it the same treatment but still had issues with big pauses and stutters. This could be that this system uses an older i7 CPU and has less RAM than my other higher-end desktop.

These stutters and glitches, though didn't show anything with Latency Monitor, and in order to find who was causing problems this time around, I checked the Event Viewer every time a pause or hiccup occurred. These always correlated with Windows checking something on the network whether it's the network in general for any shares, or the internet even though I do not browse on this machine at all except to check for software updates. The solution for this is to disable the network in Windows and not by pulling the cable from the machine. Disconnecting the cable did nothing because Windows kept checking anyway. With both a wireless and wired connection on this machine, I only use the wired anyway, I disabled both and that helped.

With you running a laptop, this may be a bit more difficult, though. In addition to the above-mentioned solutions for my desktops, you may have to disable other things. On many laptops and other bundled pre-built PCs such as those from Dell, and HP, among others, they install a lot of other unnecessary garbage and usually the worst antivirus on the market. McAfee is very system heavy and can cause all kinds of performance issues in general. For both Dell desktops, that was the first thing I uninstalled and used the built-in Windows Defender. Once I did that the machine performance overall was like night and day.