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Comment by Scramblejams | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I wouldn't have expected it to be that low, though in the aircraft space, control harmony can be disrupted with as little as 20ms of delay between control input and control surface movement[0].

Do you have any research you can suggest for that 5ms number?

[0] http://www.klabs.org/history/history_docs/reports/dfbw_tomay... (Keeping the delay at or under 10ms was the recommendation I got from the study P.I.)

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Here's one :

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mp.2006.24.1.49?seq=1

And another (follow the links to the article, but I thought that particular graph was most informative) :

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Audio-latency-tolerance-...

It's not that low. Up to 40ms (roundtrip) isn't a problem for solo playing, in my experience. And it's also a matter of training. Church organists learn to play with much larger delays.

I can deal with 10ms roundtrip, but not much more.

One issue is when you get some acoustic sound too (open headphones, bone conductance, singing) and pretty much any delay in the headphone signal causes phase interference.

Yeah, I have to add that for me 40ms is ok when playing a virtual instrument.

Did you ever see people who try to sing with headphones with a delay of around 200ms? That really messes up your performance.

With a virtual instrument you would usually not face the full round trip latency, but rather control latency (MIDI?) and audio output latency (usually 50% of roundtrip). So in the VSTi case that might be closer to 25ms than 40ms in practice. Often the latency jitter is quite dreadful in this case as the control signal is not synchronous to audio.

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