SQ Waves latency experiment: USB vs Waves card vs External audio interface

[humanpyramids]

Hi All,

Just been experimenting with latency variations of a few different set-ups and thought I would share the results!

I know Soundgrid Server would be the best option (other than A&H releasing Source Expander for the SQ! 🙏), but budget can’t quite stretch there yet..

2020 Macbook Pro on Big Sur running Superrack Performer, one instance of PSE – time difference measured via smaart.

SQ USB (48k 32 buffer) 20.25ms
SQ USB (96k 32 buffer) 12.06ms
APOGEE DUET (96k 32 buffer) 5.71ms
APOGEE DUET (48k 32 buffer) 4.96ms
WAVES CARD (96K 32 buffer) 3.27ms

I then tried a few different pieces of software to run the PSE to see if there was any variations:

SUPERRACK (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.27ms
LOGIC (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.27ms
ABLETON (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.69ms
REAPER (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.27ms
LIVE PROFFESSOR (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.27ms

Then lastly tried upping the buffer sizes in Superrack:

SUPERRACK (96K 32 BUFFER) 3.27ms
SUPERRACK (96K 64 BUFFER) 3.94ms
SUPERRACK (96K 96 BUFFER) 4.6ms
SUPERRACK (96K 128 BUFFER) 5.27ms

Hope that’s useful to someone out there!

Wondering if my laptop could handle multitrack recording and a few instances of PSE simultaneously (and smaart!) 🤔

[Jos]

Hi! This is useful — more data is good. 🙂 I’m curious about the setup you used for the initial I/O measurements. My guess is something like this, but please correct me if I’ve got it wrong:

“SQ USB” Setup is Laptop → USB-C → SQ with audio passed out and back in digitally via USB
“APOGEE DUET” Setup is Laptop → USB-C → Apogee → XLR → SQ with channels passed as analog audio out and back in
“WAVES CARD” Setup is Laptop → Ethernet → SQ Waves Card with channels passed digitally as Waves channel assignments

Something like that?

[Author]

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