— Arpeggiator

There's an acquainted composer/arranger/musician who works with his PC's embedded soundcard. He doesn't mind it, but really that's a mistake.

Here's why: a professional sound interface is optimised for recording at high quality, it will always have a lot better sound quality/clarity than a consumer soundcard, and it has lower latency, which is what matters a lot. A pro sound interface won't drop out samples or clip harshly or crackle in the middle of a microphone recording, as an example. And you can actually play the soft synths naturally, quickly, with a pro sound interface.


Cakewalk audio setup panel

Latency is simply the time it takes for sound to get to/from the soundcard. So with more delay, it's harder to play the synthesisers, they become unwieldy/heavy on fingers. The less the latency, the more natural the playback. For a good sound interface, 5 milliseconds is achievable. A low-quality onboard soundcard, even with tricks, can only manage about 25 at best. Which is a problem for, say, quick percussion parts or anything with quick dynamics. You have to "lead" your timing ahead of the machine's delay.


REAPER driver report

Anything more than 50 msec. is already perceived as a delay/echo; 8-10 milliseconds and less are an acceptable value for quick playing.

ASIO is a professional programming interface for sound device drivers, created by Steinberg for use with their own sequencers. Just like the other Steinberg standard, VST, ASIO has become a professional standard you can't live without. A normal sound path in an operating system (MacOS, Windows, Solaris, Linux, what have you) is for the OS kernel to receive sound, process it, then output to the soundcard through whichever (low-quality/precision) drivers there are. Obviously this is not pure. The OS kernel will likely resample/quantise, mangle, and delay the waveform in at least one way. This also takes time to process, hence you won't ever get quick latency with a consumer soundcard with no ASIO drivers.

ASIO drivers simply transmit sound data directly to and from the sound interface/card. Bypassing any OS mangling. This not only allows you to get exactly what's playing/recording to/from the soundcard, this also bypasses slow OS kernel mixing and helps decrease latency. Which means everything is as quick as possible.


Roland UA-1G ASIO driver setting

ASIO's not absolutely perfect, mind it. Because it works with the hardware directly, it can sometimes transmit said hardware's errors. On overloaded computers USB can get a processing priority that's too low and when the CPU is stalling, recording/playback may also stall. This happens more often when there're too many software synths/effects running, so increasing an app's and soundcard's sound buffer size helps (this increases processing time available to the computer). Also often when an app that's using ASIO drivers crashes, it takes the ASIO stack, freezing it.

Strictly speaking, you cannot live without ASIO and a pro sound interface. It's a lot better anyway, also for listening to music, so why bother with consumer devices?

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