[sdiy] Monosynth features poll

[Antti Huovilainen]

On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, cheater cheater wrote:

> Rather than the randomness, it's about the immediate feedback between
> what my ears hear and what my fingers feel (the physical position of
> the key and vibration from the mechanism of the key)

The neural feedback is not even close to immediate: The nerve signal takes 
some tens of milliseconds to reach from fingertips to brain. Also the key 
travel is not instantaneous.

Because of both, the latency isn't really that important as long as jitter 
is low. I don't have official sources, but in some conversations with my 
prof back when I worked at HUT acoustics lab, he mentioned that the goal 
was to get latency down to 2-3 ms in the industry these days. Elsewhere 
(unfortunately I have no recollection where) I read that the best drummers 
can detect about 1 ms jitter. Of course, this is for drums which are much 
more timing sensitive than synths in any practical non-sequencer usage.

I'd summarize the above as "As long as the jitter is within a millisecond 
or two and latency is below about 5 ms, the physical feel of the keyboard 
is more important than minor timing deviations from ideal."

Antti

"No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow"
   -- Lt. Cmdr. Ivanova