Looking for opinions on the best piano-style MIDI controller for Cubase…
Has anyone here noticed that some keyboards have more latency than others? And it doesn’t appear to be Cubase or the audio interface… or USB cables, etc… It’s the built-in latency in the controller itself. One of my keyboards is ~16ms slower than the other.
So, looking for a recommendations for a better keyboard. I’m interested in piano-weighted style keyboards. Specifically looking for someone who has also experienced this problem and has figured out which are “faster” keyboards.
Thanks.
Hi,
How did you measure this, please?
From my experience, the biggest issue is the jitter of the USB protocol.
This is done as a rough test with 2 keyboards side-by-side. I’ve run this test on 3 separate keyboards now.
The setup is 2 USB cables of the same length plugged into my computer and into each keyboard and then I attempt to trigger a note on each keyboard at the same time. I play the notes multiple times to make sure I get it right. I then swap which keyboard is connected to which cable and run the same test again.
The results show that consistently one keyboard is slower at sending USB data than the other, and it has nothing to do with my keyboard performance. You can see in the recorded MIDI data that one keyboard is just slower almost every single time, and roughly about 16ms slower.
I ran this test on another keyboard comparing it with the faster of the first two keyboards and I get a similar result. It’s either that the 2 slower keyboards are just slow, or that I have one keyboard that is exceptionally fast.
Note: the 2 keyboards that are slower have a heavier action than the faster keyboard, but the way I’m purposefully hitting the keys for this test to make sure they trigger at the same time convinces me it has nothing to do with the action.
Moral of the story, though, is that when you read the latency of your soundcard as, say, 10ms, this does not take into account the latency introduced by your keyboard itself.