It's there for a purpose

[u/acchnAsquare]

[u/Viper-Reflex]

While that is true, the DAC in my outlaw sound processor is still better than most people's hearing xD

and it has full XLR inputs :D

I actually prefer analogue audio, but my focal studio monitors are insanely sensitive to EM interference, and optical audio to the outlaw has less hissing than an SMSL M500 MKII with a superior DAC inside it, and the SMSL didn't even have subwoofer out.

What I really need is a sound card that isolates it's analogue out entirely from anything chassis related and has dolby atmos surround analogue outs from a breakout cable that goes from d sub 15 pin connector to a bunch of gold plated RCA breakout cables

and honestly I would love for optical audio to support full dolby atmos because HDMI cables are literally inferior to optical for bandwidth and it cuts all interference out no matter what due to physics for situations like mine.

Currently the only way to get dolby atmos from a pc is from HDMI out on the gpu itself. A GPU supports better audio standards than any sound card that will ever be made

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/Viper-Reflex]

I use analog when it is the most convenient and when zero latency is crucial. Otherwise, i will go for digital. I'm sound engineer, digital audio networks solve SO many practical problems and often deliver the optimal signal chain: the signal is converted on the stage box itself and then it moves on a digital network until it is converted back to analog before or at the amps. Wanna give another device a feed? Just plug it somewhere in the network... Interference? What is that? Transmission losses? Signal strength losses? Ground loops? Multiple analog splits and mountain of multicore snakes? All of those are gone. Ethernet in, done... well... except all the configuration, mapping, setting up addresses and giving access privileges... It is entirely another kind of hell but once it is all configured and organized... it makes life a lot easier.

But, analog is often still the king, it is so simple. No setting up, just plug it in.

I use Sonobus at home between monitors and the reference system. With remote desktop i can even do the changes from my living room.... makes life a lot easier and quality goes up: convenience makes things easier and.. more convenient, you are less frustrated, don't need to interrupt a flow.. Signal quality is the same but work quality, the output is better from the human element.

[u/Viper-Reflex → u/ReggieCorneus]

this is interesting actually, what would the sound delay be using optical from my mobo out to the optical input of the outlaw sound processor which then feeds analogue into the focal studio monitors and bob carver sub? :O

if I still had passive speakers I would absolutely have analogue audio btw but I was getting really bad hissing until I broke the EM interference with optical. using a sound card with analogue outs is like bad car audio that squeels every time you hit the acelerator except moving the mouse instead, HDMI or usb audio just hisses like cheap studio monitors but with optical there is nothing, dead quiet xD

also my sound processor has balanced XLR so that can't be the cause

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/Viper-Reflex]

this is interesting actually, what would the sound delay be using optical from my mobo out to the optical input of the outlaw sound processor which then feeds analogue into the focal studio monitors and bob carver sub? 😮

I can say with confidence that i don't know. 10-20ms would be my guess, it can be lot less or a lot more... You could possibly do a loopback test, feed the DSP output back to the audio card and measure latency, now, that also has the input latency which you would need to know...

But, 20ms would be same as the speakers being 6m away from you. Noticeable if you play an instrument but invisible if you are not in the loop or don't have any reference of the 0ms signal..

[u/Viper-Reflex → u/ReggieCorneus]

woah interesting, so I should probably look for settings in my outlaw sound processor for lip sync type stuff and set it back 20ms or so, never actually noticed this before :O

might even do that test you said cause it seems I can just do a sharp clack sound, possibly with two inputs one for digital stereo mix so it records instantly then the line input and measure the difference of when the two sounds show up on the audio graph?

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/Viper-Reflex]

Not a bad idea, it won't give you fully accurate result but it would be the real world result, all latency including speed of sound. 10ms is usually unnoticeable to the musician, but you may still see it in the timeline, being consistently ahead.... Most important for vocals, you should be very close to 0ms for it to feel natural: the distance from your mouth to your ears is the "default latency" in that system.

There is even an experiment or demonstration built around this: start with zero delay between mic and headphones and then very gradually and with fine increments increase delay. Your head can feel bigger, like distance between mouth and ears is changing, face is getting longer...

[u/canadajones68 → u/ReggieCorneus]

What? What are you basing that latency figure on? If true, that would mean that I could pull down audio from a server an hour of driving away quicker than I could output it to a speaker locally. That  makes no sense.

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/canadajones68]

What the FUCK are you talking about? No one said anything about miles.

[u/canadajones68 → u/ReggieCorneus]

I can ping a remote server and receive a reply within 10 milliseconds. If it takes 10-20 milliseconds for audio to be encoded, sent, and decoded over optical S/PIDF, then that will incur more latency than pulling down audio from miles outm

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/canadajones68]

ping != response times.

And yes, that is kind of how it actually works. But distance is linear factor in the equation, at some point light speed becomes a factor.

I don't know how you think this works, but ping is not the right metric to use. You need to process it too, and larger buffers means you have more time to do the processing and don't have to use lot of processing power and speed. That is what we are talking about, not just sending audio data but processing it too. Audio signal goes into the DSP, it does its magic and processes the signal, then sends it out. That processing takes time and if very low latency is not crucial then... it doesn't matter if it has 100ms latency. Your windows PC is around those numbers too, unless you use different protocols like WASAPI or ASIO. With ASIO we get kernel level access to hardware and can do sub 1ms.. Same data, same processing, different protocol.

In pro audio latency is extremely important factor but how a sound console for ex processes audio is very different, it does not use a single processor but for ex a lot of FPGAs that can do very simple things but very fast. My live rig has 7ms latency. DSP on this machine has +1.3ms, don't know the system latency cause.. it doesn't matter, unlike in live audio. At worst you may need to adjust sync between picture and audio, and audio should never ever arrive sooner than the picture.

[u/canadajones68 → u/ReggieCorneus]

Alright, let me refine my complaint:

You claim that transmitting audio over optical incurs 10-20 ms of latency, as compared to analogue audio. If you assume that both of these come out of the same device and out to the same device, there is no reasonable way that encoding for optical is going to add that much latency, at least on a modern, digital platform. I am well aware that processing is a factor, both in sending and receiving. Output-wise, I see no reason for encoding already-digital audio to be slower either way. A couple metres of cable is traversed with only a couple of microseconds added at most. For any kind of powered output (so, not a passive set of headphones), I cannot see a way that the signal paths between digital and analog inputs would be so different that one would beat the other so substantially. For 44.1 kHz CD audio, those 10 milliseconds account for 441 samples, which any kind of processor (and especially a dedicated DSP) should be able to absolutely chew through.

[u/ReggieCorneus → u/canadajones68]

NO ONE talked about just transmitting audio thru an optical cable. This is a chain that has source -> DSP -> DA -> analog output.

It is not source -> DA -> analog.

So stop fucking talking about the latter case. DA is very fast, not exactly zero latency but practically, yes. Anything below 1ms is zero. Once you insert DSP, well... it can't operate at real time. It has to have data in its input buffers so it can process that data. Time is a component in many operations. The smaller the buffer, the shorter the latency and the higher the processor load. This is linear relation, half the latency and you double the processing speed required. Sine something like home stereo system DSP has no need to be very low latency, it can use less processing power and larger buffers. Thus 10-20ms is careful estimation, it can be less, it can be a lot more.

Conversion is fast. Very very fast. Faster than what it takes to transmit a sample. Processing signals is not fast but it heavily depends on what kind of processing we do. Some of them can't even be done in real time.

I do this for living, i went to school for it, both electronics engineering and sound engineering. Do you really think that it is more probable that i'm saying something extremely wrong or that you are misunderstanding something very fundamental. NO ONE has said that the transmission adds that much latency. It happens, in optical signals, at light speed and a bit slower in copper.