Switch from M-Audio 192 Audiophile PCI to Arturia Minifuse 4 USB

[hihu]

Hello everyone,

after several years I have to switch my audio interface because newer mainboards don't have pci slots anymore

As slot soundcards aren't very common at the moment, I ordered an Arturia Minifuse class compliant usb interface.

So far I can say it works out of the box on my Debian 11 system, just as information for people who want to get one for linux.

However I came across the buffer size settings in my DAW (Bitwig) and it seems that for a given buffer size the audio latency is different from the old pci card. The automatic Bitwig settings are samplerate 48 khz and 1024 samples buffer size.

For the M-Audio card this results in an audio latency of 1024 samples, but for the Arturia usb sound card it results in an audio latency of 1536 samples. How can this offset of more than 500 samples occur? In my opinion it should be 1024 samples like in the M-Audio device not 1536 samples. So I would need a smaller buffer size to achieve the same audio offset?

I didn't find any explanation in the Arturias manual but somehow it doesn't seems logical to me that when using 1024 sample I get an offset of 1536.

I'm using the pipewire sound server as its the standard now for debian and tested both cards with pipewire. Do I have to change something in the pipewire oder Alsa settings, which is different for USB cards?

These are the settings for the M-Audio Audiophile 192

m-audio_settings.png (173.95 KiB) Viewed 2094 times

m-audio_dsp.png (53.2 KiB) Viewed 2094 times

Hope someone can give me an advice

[hihu]

An these are the settings for the Arturia Minifuse 4.

arturia_settings.png (155.45 KiB) Viewed 2092 times

arturia_dsp.png (53.37 KiB) Viewed 2092 times

Settings are the same, but audio latency is different.

Thank you very much in advance
hihu

[glowrak guy]

PCI is pretty stable and fast, I would buy a few win7 crates with pci slots, clean and store the mobos in anti-static bags.
In the interim, find compatible ram and video cards so you can always create new systems when needed based on a good soundcard.

Linux system usb support is one thing needing attention. But good working usb gear will be easy to find in searches, or recommended here.
I found a happy FocusRite usb user here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Focusrite/comm ... focusrite/

Cheers

[haast]

PCI is not USB, so buffers and resulting latencies will be different.
I would expect you can easily change the sample rate to 1024 and even (much) lower.
Did you try that? (your screenshots are not supporting your text about offsets)

[hihu]

Hello, thanks for you help.

@glowrak guy : Thank you for your reply. Don't worry, I will keep this pci Audio Card and also the PC motherboard, for shure. I also have much older computers for using my lovely Plextor drives, which only support ide connectors. These have also problems with adapters to S-ATA or USBz. But my main build is quiete old, more than 10 years, so I would like to update to kind of AM5 platform, where the processor speed is much higher.
This USB device is very nice and sound quality is also good for me, the connectors are way better than my old pci device, but I'm not familiar with usb devices, thats why im asking here.

@haast Thank you for your reply. I wrote the arturia support and they observed, that in Mac OSX, setting sample size to 1024 this results in a Audio input latency of 1080 samples and a audio output latency of 1069 samples.

I know that pci and usb should behave different. I tested all my internal audio chips, even the graphic cards audio output, and all of them have a audio input/output latency of 1024 samples, when using 1024 buffer size, not 1536. I tried to reduce the sample rate, as you supposed, but I get xruns with lower sample rates with the arturia for the same project file, whereas the m-audio runs at this sample rate without a problem.

So my guess is, 1536 samples is 1/3 more than 1024. 1024/2 * 3 gives 1536. As far as I remember Jack uses for PCI Devices a "period" value of 2 and for usb cards a period value of 3. That could be the reason why its 1/3 more.

I also tried to use Ardour with Jack connection, when setting the samples to 1024 I see in the right top section also 1024 samples.

So I have to think about, how to make pipewire or alsa the way, it uses 2 periods instead of 3 for usb devices.

Is there a good way to change it?

Thank you very much
hihu

[haast]

You can read this: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire ... plications and
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=24378

In Linux Manjaro (based on Arch) I set samplerate to 128 in /usr/share/pipewire/jack.conf and it works fine with a behringer usb audio interface and in Ardour and others.

Code: Select all

# global properties for all jack clients
jack.properties = {
 #node.latency       = 1024/48000
  node.latency       = 128/48000

[hihu]

Hello all together, thank you for you help.

I was able to investigating this a little more.

So I tried now to use the alsa interface directly and also tried to use the jack server. When I configure the settings there, I don't have different input/output latency values in the end result.

@haast: Thanks for the link. I checked the link for pipewire configuration, however the periods settings is only possible in a newer version of pipewire and Debian has an older version of it. I think I will wait until pipewire matures, and in the meanwhile I will stick to jack or alsa.

Furthermore, I did a practical test in Ardour, with real round trip latency.

Yes, it's like glowrak guy supposed. The roundtrip latency is worse on the Arturia USB interface. But for my usage (I only use keyboard input) it's okay. If you really need the best latency for recording, it would be better to get an PCI interface instead. I tested the USBA connection, maybe USBC is better in this regard.

See the results below:

Arturia Minifuse 4:

48khz/1024 samples:

Arturia Buffer 1024.png (65.29 KiB) Viewed 1749 times

48khz/32 samples:

Arturia Buffer 32.png (65.29 KiB) Viewed 1749 times

[hihu]

M-Audio Audiophile 192:

48khz/1024 samples:

M-Audio Buffer 1024.png (65.57 KiB) Viewed 1744 times

48khz/32 samples:

M-Audio Buffer 32.png (65.75 KiB) Viewed 1744 times

PS: Should I report the Arturia Minifuse 4 at the alsa Homepage, that it's working? https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Main_Page
Website seems a little bit outdated.

Greetings and thank you very much
hihu