| > Aggregating devices adds a huge chunk of latency In the situations where I have to do it--and it's less about "buying the gear that suits my needs," more "having to bash together other people's gear on a shoestring"--I find that aggregation ends up around 30ms, which is on the higher end of acceptable when monitoring in-ear. (To be specific--this is not for music but rather audio routing for video. Occasionally I'm on-site somewhere and need to be able to monkey up something a little faster than I'd like, you know?) Trying to do that with ASIO at all is impossible. So it's a pretty big deal. > That said, I'm not sure what you think is going on with ASIO, since any class compliant USB audio interface has compatible drivers inherently.. In theory, yes. In practice, I find ASIO a little unstable (my home setup uses Ableton on Windows as a live mixer through a TASCAM US-16x08, though I'll be going back to using a Mac when I get back my Mac mini from a friend). I have never had Core Audio kernel panic a machine, but I've had machines (in one memorable case, the same machine dual-booting a hackintoshed OS X and Windows) hard-lock as soon as I enabled ASIO on two different devices (my old TASCAM US-1200 and my a friend's 8i6). It is not unusable, by any means, but for my purposes (again, live shows) predictability is a big plus. |
I haven't done that kind of work, so for video/speech, fair enough. 30ms (on top of whatever's already there) is not really acceptable for a musical performance, though - the performer will be expending half their brainpower trying to mentally align what they hear through bone conduction vs in ear monitoring and adjusting their performance based on outdated/scrambled information. It's a really confusing experience - if you've ever seen that Japanese "speech jammer" device[0] you'll get some idea what I mean (although it uses much longer than ~30ms, that's still enough to mess with you).
Working in a pinch, it would make a useful and more stable tool than ASIO, though I run either analog or dedicated devices for any live work - I just don't trust computers that much - but I get that working with video means you might not have those kind of options. I can't say I've had many of the troubles I've heard about with ASIO to be honest, but I undeniably do enjoy working on OSX more anyway. This conversation reminds me how badly I need to revive my ML Hackintosh..
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USDI3wnTZZg