On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 06:11:26 -0500, john gibby wrote: >I like the idea of using the PCIE bus, to minimize latency for my >digital piano. But an external (USB) audio interface would introduce >less than 1ms latency, and might be a good practical solution. Hi, I get lower latency with a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, an USB audio interface, than with a RME HDSPe AIO, a PCIe audio interface. For both, my old ASUS M2A-VM HDMI with a 2.1 GHz Athlon dual-core, as well as for my new GA-B85M-D3H with a 2.8 GHz Celeron dual-core. The PCIe card not necessarily suffers more from computer emissions, than gear that is galvanic isolated from the computer, e.g. by ADAT lightpipes and one or two meters away from the computer, just the risk is higher that a build in card could suffer from computer emissions. Class compliant audio interfaces are better supported by Linux, than other audio interfaces. All pro-sumer audio interfaces I ever heard, sounded better, than any onboard audio device I ever heard. If the audio quality of your onboard audio device is all you need, then you most likely could buy any Linux compatible pro-sumer audio interface, no need to compare audio quality of different pro-sumer devices or to buy a professional audio interface. You still need to take care about other quality aspects. Consider to read customer reviews, e.g. the power supplies of some external audio interfaces are known to break. FWIW on my old mobo the audio hardware didn't share IRQs and on the new mobo the audio hardware shares IRQs, but I only experienced issues with my old mobo and the PCIe card. Regards, Ralf _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
