I’ve been told that if you’re using a certain DAC or AMP, the sound arrives late to the headphone, which is critical for competitive games unless it is a Soundblaster, which is designed for gaming. And I want to know if a delay or latency happens when going through DAC/AMP. Shall I just get SBX AE-9 for desktop gaming? Are there any other products that doesn’t delay the sound?
There is some based on the unit yes, but it is in milliseconds and you more than likely won’t notice much if at all differences or complications involving this… this particular mindset of this delay causing issue is from the most absolute extreme elitist mindset of the competitive crowd and in my opinion should go ignored. The average human reaction time is 0.25 seconds or 250 milliseconds so being delayed a whole maybe 5(on average it’s really around 2-3) milliseconds is practically nothing. Anybody who claims to notice a difference in this regard and that it causes them issues, I highly have doubts to… no offense to them just my opinion on this.
Don’t limit yourself on what amp and dac to get in this fashion… get what appeals to you and what sounds the best as well as supplying enough power to what you want to use.
The main “delay” you should be concerned with is wireless latency… as this can get pretty bad in competitive fps up to half a second of delay
Do not think there is a product that would be “delay-less”.
If just looking numbers and technology. There is always delay and like Falenkor mentioned.
It’s in the milliseconds and so to us it’s really un-noticeable.
Wireless, there might be more issues.
Well this particular topic seems to confuse some gamers… There’s a lot more to the delay than some realize… as someone using an amp and dac you get around 2-3 milliseconds of delay to the audio in a game… which is fine but then you have to take your ping into account which is your natural delay in game again counted in Milliseconds but the average gamer is from 40-70 ms, then you have to take into account what screen they are using because tv screens and monitors both have response times as well as refresh rates that can cause delays as some tv’s can get up to almost 20 ms of delay, then you have wireless controller delay which is small like the amp and dac… keyboard and mouse can also have this more so the keyboard and it’s actuation timings. All of this counts towards delay in audio and delay in visual.
Amp and dacs are the least of the concern really unless one is using a wireless headphone of which you absolutely should be using a low latency amp/dac
Yeah but your senses and the start of the action the video or audio youre reacting too dont start at rhe same point. You still have to wait for equipment delay before your human delay kicks in. Its still pretty negligable, unless there is an a/v sync issue
It’s extremely negligible… to be worried about roughly a 2 Millisecond extra delay? Wireless gaming headsets have more than that and people use them just fine these days. I mean, less your playing something so extremely demanding like FOR HONOR where ever single millisecond counts… it isn’t going to matter at all
hell, I would be more concerned with my internet ping delay in game than I would my audio cues lmao.
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Few inital points:
- Most monitors have an input delay in the 1 to 8ms range
- Most panels (in said monitor) has a grey-to-grey time in the same range
- All those fancy wireless thingies (including WiFi) add latency in the double digit range. IIRC Logitechs high-end gear is equal to hardwired USB
(If you are on wifi, even just temporarily running a cable to your router may help a lot with ping/latency)
However:
Most games have audio as an afterthought of sorts.
So unless you have that one magical game that supports ASIO, you are looking at about 100 ms delay no matter what device you use.
That is largely thanks to the games handing their sound off to the wonderland that is the Windows audio stack and hope for the best.
A congested USB bus (= Running a USB 2.0 Hub with multiple devices on it) may make this worse. USB 3.0 handles this much better.
PCIe based soundcards/interfaces may do better, I can’t check that to make sure though.
As for amplifiers:
You are looking at delay in the single or double digit micro seconds (1000th of a milli second) range here. Measuring this short of a delay is starting to become difficult.
In practical terms: Delay wise, the amplifier does not exist.
Found an article with some interesting latency measurements:
Keep in mind:
- The measurements are made with ASIO (except the UCA222 which doesn’t have an ASIO driver). As MazeFrame noted, most games do not support ASIO.
- The measurements are a combination of output delay and input delay. For a game, only the output delay would be important.
- These audio interfaces are designed for music production so their performance might not be representative of popular gaming or audiophile products.
Would like to see, even one gamer. That would go as far to have a RME Fireface UFX+ at the desk only for gaming. How much? Like 2k or something.
“Ok, i’ll just keep this 40$ Logitech usb-headphone thingy and continue playing” like nothing.