Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Arturia Audiofuse latency comparison Surface Pro vs Desktop”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent and welcome to Malta music technology. Today, I’m going to do a very quick latency comparison on the Arturia audio fuse. Now I did a review of this very recently, a very long and in-depth an involved review that covered absolutely every aspect of this remarkable audio interface. One thing I talked about at great length was the latency and the buffer sizes offered up by the audio fuse and its driver, and I concluded that the latency performance was excellent.
However, they gave you all these sort of options that you could never reach, because the buffer sizes were so remarkably low that it was always going to crackle. However, a few people have pointed out that perhaps it wasn’t the audio fuse. That was the trouble, but the surface that I was testing on mmm. I thought that’s interesting, possibly I mean I certainly meant to get across in the video that all the performance testing that I was doing was only actually relevant to the system that I was testing on, because the process, the speed in the system in general, is always A factor when you’re testing for a latency performance. So even though I had every confidence that my conclusions about the latency were bang on, it certainly seemed like a good idea to test the audio fuse on a proper desktop computer and see what the perforce was like.
On there just to see, if there’s any difference between running it on the surface Pro or running it, on a proper desktop. So here I have my surface pro 2017. It’S an i5 processor with 8 gigs of ram. But of course it’s au series.
Processor. It’S one of those mobile ultrabook type processes that are awesome for mobile platforms, but not exactly the same or even remotely like anything that gives desktop performance. The audio PC that you can see over here just come round a little bit.
This fella, which I’ve just built, is also an i5 with 16 gigs of RAM, but it’s a desktop processor, it’s a Core i5 8 600, which is very much a different situation, a different environment, a different platform than the humble little surface. This one is designed and built for audio processing for door use for being a music making studio the surface pro it’s sort of designed for hanging out in cool coffee shops and and touching and stuff. But I think I’ve demonstrated that it can be a pretty decent little music making machine within its limitations.
I’M not going to get I’m not going to go into messes of depth like I did in my original review. I just want to do a simple comparison. Just to show if there is any difference at all, I’m going to use a very simple test: I’ve just got Cubase open with an instrument loaded and a simple patch and we’re going to reduce the latency until it crackles. We are down at 128 samples now. This is with safe mode. Disabled, safe mode introduces a couple more milliseconds of latency to ensure that the plate back is good and glitch-free, which is what you want, and actually that works really really well. This still gets down to very low latencies of about 2.5 millions for an output latency and that’s awesome, that’s kind of really all you need everything below. This is kind of bonus, town really, but what I found when testing the audio fuse with the Studio Pro is that as soon as you got sort of below 1.5 milliseconds, it would glitch and what I what I said why I offered. That was the idea that actually USB can’t really handle that kind of latency and that’s the reason why it was glitching. So let’s reaffirm that here so at 2.5, milliseconds output latency, it’s fine. Let’S reduce that down to 64 samples. This takes us down to an output latency of one point, five milliseconds and, as you can hear, it’s starting to glitch go down even further to 32 samples.
We are in glitch town. That’S what I saw before. That’S what I’m seeing this time and that’s why I said that these lower buffer sizes, weren’t of any use to us. However, let’s try it on the desktop machine so now have the audio fuse routed up this cable plugged in the front of my audio PC same deal as before, with the retrologue loaded buffer size set 128 Apple, latency 2.5 milliseconds playback is perfect. Let’S take it down to 64, which gives us the 1.5 milliseconds we had on the surface a moment ago. Wow look at that.
That seems to be fine. Let’S take it down to 32 samples 16. Now, even though the applet latency here isn’t going down, the overall latency of the system has got very very low and it requires the computer to work very hard in order to move the audio out without any glitching. I mean it’s down to almost that three millisecond round-trip latency, but they talked about.
If I go down to eight samples, which is the lowest setting, it’s still absolutely no problem, I mean I wouldn’t say that eight samples was particularly stable because I have had the odd crash when testing this out. So you know, I think a sample is really caning. It it’s really kind of hitting it on the edge there, but here it is it’s doing exactly what our curious said. It would do a three millisecond round-trip latency down to one point: five milliseconds on an output on a desktop core i5 computer.
So what does this mean? Does this mean I was wrong before well sort of, but not exactly, I mean I did attempt to stress in the review that the figures I was given in the performance results I was given was only really relevant to the surface pro. However, I completely concede that I did not really stress that I didn’t put that across as well as I’d hoped, and so hopefully, this little video will clarify that. So what have we seen? We’Ve seen that the surface pro I’m running here running with the audio fuse, can achieve excellent latencies of down to about 2.5 million output latency and that for any mobile device, any laptop any Ultrabook any hybrid. That kind of thing that’s an excellent latency result, which is something that I you know, celebrated and made a big fuss of in the review.
So the latency is excellent. However, it can’t access those really really tiny, Meany buffer sizes that the audio fuse offers. However, on a desktop computer on a proper one, you know designed for audio and doors and music making, and that kind of thing the sort of thing that melted music technology builds. That computer was fully capable of accessing even the tiniest buffer sizes, down to eight samples, which is ridiculous, a ridiculously low buffer size, but it could access them, it could use them and it gave us a glitch free playback. So what does that mean? It just means that a proper desktop computer running a desktop core i5 i7 processor is just a lot better than a mobile device than a surface than a laptop. It’S better at doing it it’s more efficient. It has more power.
It’S able to deal with the data going in and out so much better, and so it can take full advantage of the audio fuses. Awesome drivers, laptops, ultrabooks surfaces. Mobile devices are just not the same when it comes to media production.
I know we all get confused because everything’s a core i5 everything’s a core i7 these days and we’re kind of fooled into believing that they are the same or similar and they’re not they’re, not at all. We’Ve got to look at what series those processors are so with a you series: processor, that’s in a in a laptop or a surface. Those are designed for power saving to be extremely efficient for a very little amount of power, but that is that the cost of raw processing power to move data in and out successfully for everyday tasks, absolutely fine for doing something really high-level like audio. It will struggle.
However, you know, as I’ve shown the surface pro, is an awesome little machine for doing a certain amount of live performance and studio, work and music making. So don’t assume that, therefore the surface is somehow it’s not it’s certainly adequate and it can run the audio fuse at a very low latency. On the other hand, if you want to do it properly, if you want to get the fullest experience from your door and your music reduction, then you still need a desktop PC desktop PC is the one that’s gon na. Do it properly, it’s gon na give you all that power all that movement of data stability and assurance that you’re gon na be able to do a whole shitload of stuff at very, very low latencies.
So there you go. I hope that was useful and, in the meantime, go and make some tunes. .