Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Latency in Digital Audio

We've come a long way since Alexander Graham Bell, and everything's turned digital.

Compared to analog audio, digital audio processing is extremely versatile, is much easier to design and implement than analog processing, and also adds effectively zero noise along the way. With rising computing power and dropping costs, every operating system has had drivers, engines, and libraries to record, process, playback, transmit, and store audio for over 20 years.

Today we'll talk about the some of the differences between analog and digital audio, and how the widespread use of digital audio adds a new challenge: latency.

Analog vs Digital


Analog data flows like water through an empty pipe. You open the tap, and the time it takes for the first drop of water to reach you is the latency. When analog audio is transmitted through, say, an RCA cable, the transmission happens at the speed of electricity and your latency is:

wire length/speed of electricity

This number is ridiculously smallespecially when compared to the speed of sound. An electrical signal takes 0.001 milliseconds to travel 300 metres (984 feet). Sound takes 874 milliseconds (almost a second).

All analog effects and filters obey similar equations. If you're using, say, an analog pedal with an electric guitar, the signal is transformed continuously by an electrical circuit, so the latency is a function of the wire length (plus capacitors/transistors/etc), and is almost always negligible.

Digital audio is transmitted in "packets" (buffers) of a particular size, like a bucket brigade, but at the speed of electricity. Since the real world is analog, this means to record audio, you must use an Analog-Digital Converter. The ADC quantizes the signal into digital measurements (samples), packs multiple samples into a buffer, and sends it forward. This means your latency is now:

(wire length/speed of electricity) + buffer size

We saw above that the first part is insignificant, what about the second part?

Latency is measured in time, but buffer size is measured in bytes. For 16-bit integer audio, each measurement (sample) is stored as a 16-bit integer, which is 2 bytes. That's the theoretical lower limit on the buffer size. The sample rate defines how often measurements are made, and these days, is usually 48KHz. This means each sample contains ~0.021ms of audio. To go lower, we need to increase the sample rate to 96KHz or 192KHz.

However, when general-purpose computers are involved, the buffer size is almost never lower than 32 bytes, and is usually 128 bytes or larger. For single-channel 16-bit integer audio at 48KHz, a 32 byte buffer is 0.33ms, and a 128 byte buffer is 1.33ms. This is our buffer size and hence the base latency while recording (or playing) digital audio.

Digital effects operate on individual buffers, and will add an additional amount of latency depending on the delay added by the CPU processing required by the effect. Such effects may also add latency if the algorithm used requires that, but that's the same with analog effects.

The Digital Age


So everyone's using digital. But isn't 1.33ms a lot of additional latency?

It might seem that way till you think about it in real-world terms. Sound travels less than half a meter (1½ feet) in that time, and that sort of delay is completely unnoticeable by humansotherwise we'd notice people's lips moving before we heard their words.

In fact, 1.33ms is too small for the majority of audio applications!

To process such small buffer sizes, you'd have to wake the CPU up 750 times a second, just for audio. This is highly inefficient, and wastes a lot of power. You really don't want that on your phone or your laptop, and is completely unnecessary in most cases anyway.

For instance, your music player will usually use a buffer size of ~200ms, which is just 5 CPU wakeups per second. Note that this doesn't mean that you will hear sound 200ms after hitting "play". The audio player will just send 200ms of audio to the sound card at once, and playback will begin immediately.

Of course, you can't do that with live playback such as video calls—you can't "read-ahead" data you don't have. You'd have to invent a time machine first. As a result, apps that use real-time communication have to use smaller buffer sizes because that directly affects the latency of live playback.

That brings us back to efficiency. These apps also need to conserve power, and 1.33ms buffers are really wasteful. Most consumer apps that require low latency use 10-15ms buffers, and that's good enough for things like voice/video calling, video games, notification sounds, and so on.

Ultra Low Latency


There's one category left: musicians, sound engineers, and other folk that work in the pro-audio business. For them, 10ms of latency is much too high!

You usually can't notice a 10ms delay between an event and the sound for it, but when making music, you can hear it when two instruments are out-of-sync by 10ms or if the sound for an instrument you're playing is delayed. Instruments such as drum snare are more susceptible to this problem than others, which is why the stage monitors used in live concerts must not add any latency.

The standard in the music business is to use buffers that are 5ms or lower, down to the 0.33ms number that we talked about above.

Power consumption is absolutely no concern, and the real problems are the accumulation of small amounts of latencies everywhere in your stack, and ensuring that you're able to read buffers from the hardware or write buffers to the hardware fast enough.

Let's say you're using an app on your computer to apply digital effects to a guitar that you're playing. This involves capturing audio from the line-in port, sending it to the application for processing, and playing it from the sound card to your amp.

The latency while capturing and outputting audio are both multiples of the buffer size, so it adds up very quickly. The effects app itself will also add a variable amount of latency, and at 1.33ms buffer sizes you will find yourself quickly approaching a 10ms latency from line-in to amp-out. The only way to lower this is to use a smaller buffer size, which is precisely what pro-audio hardware and software enables.

The second problem is that of CPU scheduling. You need to ensure that the threads that are fetching/sending audio data to the hardware and processing the audio have the highest priority, so that nothing else will steal CPU-time away from them and cause glitching due to buffers arriving late.

This gets harder as you lower the buffer size because the audio stack has to do more work for each bit of audio. The fact that we're doing this on a general-purpose operating system makes it even harder, and requires implementing real-time scheduling features across several layers. But that's a story for another time!

I hope you found this dive into digital audio interesting! My next post will be is about my journey in implementing ultra low latency capture and render on Windows in the WASAPI plugin for GStreamer. This was already possible on Linux with the JACK GStreamer plugin and on macOS with the CoreAudio GStreamer plugin, so it will be interesting to see how the same problems are solved on Windows. Tune in!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very interesting and well written, kudos !