Now in development: Under 4ms studio out delay in BBP ASIO!

I’ve gone over the audio path with a fine-toothed comb and given the studio output its own dedicated breakaway core. This way I can process it first and then hand the audio back to the sound card, before I even start on the FM path. I’ve also added three options for this core to allow the user to make tradeoffs:

2-band or Wideband final limiters. 2-band uses 1ms and Wideband uses 0.5ms. It’s worth keeping this 2-band — wideband limiter allows the drums to punch holes in the mix and cause distortion, similar to an L1 or an 1100. In my opinion it’s worth the extra half millisecond for the huge improvement.

Bass clipper on or off. Uses 2ms. Not worth the delay in my opinion, so I recommend keeping this off.

Multiband limiters on/off. Adds 1ms of delay. Unchecking this changes the tone of the studio output audio, since the multiband limiters are normally used to simulate pre-emphasis clipping, to keep the studio output sound similar to the on-air sound.

With 2B Lim and MB Lim on, and buffer size 256 on an ESI Juli@ (at 192khz), the TOTAL delay analog input to analog output is 888 samples, or 4.625 milliseconds. If that’s not fast enough for your DJs, you’re just gonna have to settle for an 8200. 🙂

With the processing completely bypassed, the analog in to analog out delay is 3ms, so we’re rapidly approaching the limit of what is possible with audio cards today.

As you can see above, low latency processing is not phase linear. (Dream on!)

This is all working on my development machines, but as always it will need a lot of further testing. Just letting you know ahead of time 🙂.

Best,
///Leif