Audio delay is a thing?

[Traveler]

yo.. it's me again

I was thinking of getting myself an Asgard 3 and Topping e30 combo, so I was wondering would a potential 50-60ms sound latency in games caused by an external sound source such as the one mentioned above introduce a bigger competitive disadvantage compared to a potential electrical interference (buzzing sound) when plugging the headphones directly to an onboard sound chip via USB port on the motherboard?

[Tuhin Lavania]

I have Sennheiser HD600 and Modi Magni stack for audio. Good audio performance but if you are concerned about reducing latency then I've seen no difference with it and without it.

Tbh all this stuff is snake oil. Makes no difference. I know people who have zero optimised systems and who play amazingly well than people with optimised systems and with all those tweaks and bells and whistles. Your network connection is all that matters and I've stopped bothering with all other stuff.

[assombrosso]

Asking the wrong question, 50-60ms sound delay isn’t the issue, 50-60ms delay due to lag is the issue. Some ppl noticed lag only when their headphones are connected.

[Traveler]

but if you are concerned about reducing latency then I've seen no difference with it and without it.

How would we even test this properly?
I know Battlenonsense tried it once, but I'm not sure how accurate his testing method was.

[Traveler]

Asking the wrong question, 50-60ms sound delay isn’t the issue, 50-60ms delay due to lag is the issue. Some ppl noticed lag only when their headphones are connected.

In-game sound delay is caused by system latency and has nothing to do with external DAC/AMP?

[InputLagger]

but if you are concerned about reducing latency then I've seen no difference with it and without it.

How would we even test this properly?
I know Battlenonsense tried it once, but I'm not sure how accurate his testing method was.

Disconnect speakers, headphones completely and try to play without sound

[Traveler]

Disconnect speakers, headphones completely and try to play without sound

Instructions unclear!.. monitor thrown out of a window and got stuck on a neighbour's roof.

[Slender]

if you want use usb dac / mic you need to move this devices to external usb pci controller or move mouse to external controller.
for my cases im use that options:
1) If you use amd system, you can use only mouse in cpu usb / another devices in chipset usb
2) if you use intel, you can move mouse to internal GL 2.0 usb (usually front usb 2.0), or buy 4ports usb for dac / mic / keyboard
3) use good pci usb controller for mice
mcs9990 - good if mice work in usb 1.1, worse on usb 2.0 (1000hz - 1.1 / 2000, 4000, 8000hz - 2.0)
nec v1 - good for mice, but anyway have jitter (996hz-1004hz delta)
nec v2 - good for devices, very worse for mouse (very high jitter 970hz-1030hz) + you need affinity because this chip is "jumps" core to core.
test with drivers for nec give me worse results.
VIA - bad, but im forget test it with via drivers, without i have jitter 1000-500-1000-500

im not tested any another controllers, but i want to test asm3142 pci 1x

[DudeBeFishing]

If the 50-60ms is from mouse click to audio output, that's on the low side from what I've seen.

Battle(non)sense on Youtube tested a few audio devices. The lowest latency device was his motherboard's audio, Realtek ALC S1220. Other devices had higher latency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTuZvRF-OgE

I had similar results when testing my audio devices. I ran the same test using my mic and headphones to record the delay between the left mouse click and the game's audio. I don't remember the exact latency, but it was quite significant.

Audio devices tested:

Realtek ALC-899: 80-100ms
Modi Multibit USB: 180-200ms
Realtek to Modi with Toslink: 80-100ms
Scarlett Solo: over 200ms
Scarlett Solo with VB-Audio ASIO Bridge: 100ms

The notable difference is the windows drivers for the Modi Multibit and Scarlett Solo have almost double the latency. The Scarlett Solo has the ability to lower the audio buffer size. Reducing this does affect latency, but only by a few ms. To get the Solo down to 100ms, I had to use VB-Audio's ASIO Bridge as my default windows audio output. I set the buffer size in the Focusrite software to 256, and set the Max Latency in the ASIO Bridge app to 3072. Setting either lower caused audio crackling.

Apologies if this counts as bumping an old thread. I figured it's better to post here than create another thread.