August 12, 2025 • 40 mins
Latency, it’s that tiny, annoying delay between what you say and what you hear back. In the studio, online, or even in your own headphones, it can trip you up, wreck your timing, and make you feel like you’re talking to yourself in slow motion.
In this episode of The Pro Audio Suite, Robbo, AP, George, and Robert dig into:
-
What latency really is (and why it’s not just a tech buzzword)
-
How it sneaks into your recording chain
-
The difference between “good” latency and “bad” latency
-
Fixes you can do right now without buying a new rig
-
When hardware or interface upgrades actually make sense
Whether you’re a VO artist fighting through a remote session, a podcaster dealing with talkback lag, or a studio pro chasing perfect sync, this is your guide to killing the delay and getting back in the groove.
Proudly supported by Tri-Booth and Austrian Audio, we only partner with brands we believe in, and these two deliver the goods for pro audio pros like you.
🎙 Listen now and get ahead of the delay.
Proudly supported by our mates at Tri-Booth and Austrian Audio.
Tri-Booth gives you a world-class recording space that fits in your spare room (or your suitcase), while Austrian Audio mics deliver the clarity and detail that make every take shine. We use them, we trust them, and we think you’ll love them too.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Get ready.
Be history. Get started.
Welcome.
Hi. Hi. Hi.
Hello, everyone, to the pro audio suite.
These guys are professional and motivated.
Please take the video. Stars.
George was a founder of Source Element.
Robert Marshall, international audioengineer Darren Robin
Roberts and global voice Andrew repeaters.
Thanks to tribal Austrian audio lighting,passionate elements George the tech
(00:22):
wisdom and Rob APIs international demosto find out more about us.
Jake the Proteas sweetcorn line up.
Ready? Here we go.
And welcome to another pro audio suitethanks to Triber.
Don't forget the code.
Try Pip 200 to get $200 off your try.
Booth and Austrian audiomaking your passion heard.
(00:44):
And like should you say there is somethingheading this way towards me?
That's me from Austrian audio.
Can't say anything yet, but, we'll begiving that a whirl in weeks to come.
And I'm a little bit excited.
I want to know. Can't tell you.
How I'm going to wonder that I'm goingto be completely distracted for this.
What?
(01:04):
It was just going to keep coming upwith random ideas through the episode.
Yeah, exactly. Going is it is it?
Yeah. Does it sound like.
Can you get it at CVS?
Yes, you can.
But it's under a plexus plexi.
Kits.
You have to get them to outopen it up for you.
(01:25):
Is it chocolate colored.
And there are no buts about it.
But anyway.
You had.
To be on the beginning of the show.Seriously.
Maybe we should do that for a,
We should put that out as the episode.
It's a Patreon, you know?
You want to hear the weird shit?
I said I'd like to. Get that. Joke.Yeah. Patreon.
(01:46):
I mean, the nice bit there is.
You know, we're now talking abouthearing things late, so there you go.
That probably sits.
Oh, it does indeed,because the latency is,
Well, I mean, everyone kind of knows
what latency is,but really do we know what latency is?
Well, I.
Think a lot of people are confused about.
What is. See, delay.
Let's let's start let's start with what?
(02:07):
It's not it's not echoing back.
Yeah.
Well, it kind of does.
I mean, I guess because, you know,if you like, you can sort of hear
ringing in other people'sheadphones and stuff. Right?
Echoing back is caused by latency,but latency is not echoing.
Best latency is what in its most basicform, latency is the time it takes your
audio signal to go through your systemto be processed digitally.
(02:28):
Sometimesit might be sent to another machine
and come back,and then it's got to go back into
whatever it is you're usingand then go back out.
So it's the time it takesis time for that process to happen.
Yeah. Latency is the time for a processto take place.
Yeah, exactly.
And sometimes for me to understandwhat you just said.
Yeah.
So like say, look, I mean, biggest place
I know the city's on sourceconnect sessions when I'm working with
(02:50):
maybe doing a voice over demowith or recording someone in the States.
Right.
Because it's got to get to mefrom the States and source connects
for to do it sync.
And you can talk moreabout what happens there Robert.
And then it's got to go from me.
I've got to sort of re spot,I've got to respond.
And then it's got to go backthrough that same process back to right.
Yeah. That's gone.
So that's a round trip. So that's. A real.
(03:12):
Classic latency.
The classic latencyjoke is the guy who's like at the like,
you know, the war correspondentout in the field in the control room.
Just like what's it like out there.
Oh yes Kenny.
Yeah. Yeah. It is really awful out here.
It's there on a satellite.
Q then it's going to be 3 or 4 second to.
(03:33):
Right? Yeah.
So so what what sort of thingsare happening inside a plugin.
Let's talk about for example,Inside Source Connect.
Without giving away any trade secrets,why does like for me it's
you know, I would sort of think, well,it's only got to sort of shoot
through this,you know, this computer thing.
Why does it take so longto get through there?
So there's latency all over the place.
(03:53):
Even if you've ever connectedyour audio interface and you hear yourself
like some computer software letsyou monitor yourself through the software,
and when you do, you might hear a little
like shadowing or a very quick, very,very short echo of yourself.
A musician would call it a flam.
Or ProTools is a classic example of this,because unless you use low
(04:16):
latency monitoring in the native version,you have a.
Stream. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
So then you're going to hear yourselfthrough all the buffering that occurs
where your audio interface collectsthe data.
That's one process in the audiointerface computer.
It hands it off to ProTools,ProTools records it.
Maybe ProTools even has to pass itthrough a few plugins
(04:39):
that you have on that channel.
That's also more time to,you know, to process those plugins.
And then outit goes back to your headphones.
So every DAW has a usuallysome sort of buffer.
And it's the classic thingwhere if you lower the buffer
you're going to have less latency.
It'll soundlike you're having less of a flam,
(04:59):
but then you're going to make itless stable because the computer
has less time to apply to doall these processes that it needs to.
And if it can't get them all done in time,
depending on how the software handles it,it might just stop what it's doing
and throw an error message up and say,oh, I had an error,
or it might not throwthe error message up,
but it might make all the audiosound like garbage.
(05:20):
It just depends on how the softwaredecides to handle that state.
So there's time it takes just locally
to get the audio into your computerand then into the software,
be it Pro Tools or Source Connect or Zoomor whatever it is.
It has to digitize the audioso it has a converted from a voltage to
(05:41):
to a digital signal,and then has to take that digital signal,
get it into the computer software,into the computer software.
The computer software has to do somethingwith it.
EQ compression, who knows.
In the case of Source Connect,what it's doing is
it's taking that audio data,which is a lot of audio data,
and it's putting awith a data compression on it.
(06:01):
That's not like audio compressionin terms of dynamic range.
It's compressing the audio to remove
what it knowsyou can't hear as a human, so that it can
then send less data without losingaudio quality across the internet.
So that time it takes to compressthe audio, data wise takes,
(06:23):
only a few milliseconds.
You know, 20 millisecondsactually, or something.
I think it might be less.
I think it's 20 millisecondsto compress it and decompress it.
The real time
that, no pun intended that occurs is inhauling it over the internet.
So there's a few other stepsthat connect has to take before
it gets it on the internet.
It then has to take chunksof those of that audio
(06:46):
and has to chop it upinto what's called the packet.
Think of that as likehas to put the audio in a box
so that that box can besent over the internet.
Because the internet doesn't workin continuous streams of data,
it works in packets or chunks of data.
So you have to take your audio.
That's rather continuous,chop it up into chunks or packets,
(07:09):
and then send those packets acrossthe internet, receive those packets.
And so when you receive the packets,you have to have another buffer
because you need to make surethat you get all those packets in order.
When you start sending them out,
you don't know how they're goingto go across the internet.
And sometimes some of themmight take a slightly different route
depending on how the internet,the internet's, self deterministic,
(07:30):
how it decides to deliverdata from point A to point B,
so the buffer on the receiving sideis what the
what gives the system time to make surethat it has all the packets in order
so that it can play them outwithout a hiccup or a drop out,
and then it receives all those packets,it gets them in order,
plays them out, decompresses them,and then reverses everything.
(07:54):
So it decompresses that makes themthe big string of audio hands that,
to your audio softwarethat's playing it out.
Again, in this case, it'ssort of connect off to the audio card,
which has a little small buffer in it,and then out to your headphones.
So and so all of that, depending onwhere you are, it can take a varied amount
of time, anywhere from 300 millisecondsto possibly around a half second or.
(08:16):
So with, with the internet,because we always
assume is like point A to point B,and that's it.
There's nothing in between.But it doesn't work that way, does it?
Because sometimes it'll veer off it offsome other direction.
Right.
So there's all the way the internet worksis there's these many different series.
Yeah. I don't know.
It's there's many, many, many differentinternet service providers out there.
(08:38):
And they all dowhat's called peer together.
So what makes the internet workis that all
providers on the internethave to peer with each other.
And this is where you get your issueswith net neutrality and whatnot,
because they should all dealwith each other's
data with the same priority,but they don't necessarily do that.
They really give all of each otherthe lowest priority technically.
(09:02):
So for example, AT&T, if it has datafrom its own network, it's going to pass
that data to the next hop before it passesdata from, say, T-Mobile or Verizon.
So the internet's built off
of these many, many different providersin the in the United States,
you have what's called the tier one or,you know, tier one providers.
(09:23):
And usually at some point,if you're connecting from one carrier
to another, at some pointyou end up going down
all the way down to a tierone provider and back up,
so many local carriersmight be many tiers up from a tier one.
But in theory, if you and your connectionpartner were on AT&T, if AT&T was doing
everything really perfectly,the data would never leave AT&T network.
(09:47):
That's not to say it doesn't hop acrossmany different nodes on AT&T network.
So AT&T also would peer with itself.
You know, you're in New York.
The person you're connectingwith is in, say LA.
Your signal might go
probably down through Texas,through some of various servers
(10:08):
and, you know, like Houstonand maybe over in Colorado or New Mexico.
And eventually it's just sort ofhopscotching across the country
from one peering point to the otheruntil it gets to the end endpoint.
So with with source connect the justsource elements where your service based.
So we have relay servers.
So normally source connect
(10:29):
first going to try to createwhat's called a peer to peer connection
which AT&T or the providerwould figure out that route for you.
But if your firewallscan't trust each other,
then you have to have the data comingfrom a trusted point.
And that would be our servers.
So we have servers throughout the globe.
I forget exactly where at this point,
(10:51):
because we've expanded, but we at least atone point had two in Europe,
I think three
in the United States and one in Asiaat least.
Yeah.
Those were that was in the pandemic.
We had like 5 or 6 points.I think we have more now.
But if we like I'm just thinkinglike, for instance, if I'm sitting here,
where I'm in Victoria in Australia
and I'm connecting with Rob in Sydney,
(11:14):
with which service do I pass throughto get to Sydney from here?
Would I go overseas? You might.
You might go all the way to SingaporeI think is where I think are
apex servers areI think they're in the Singapore area.
So if you were connecting peer
to peer, your connection might never leaveAustralia.
The servers serve two purposes.
(11:35):
One is a meet and greet.
So you both log in to the serverand you have no idea where each other are.
And Robbo sends a message to Andrewthat says, hey, I want to connect.
That message goes to the server and theserver says, oh, I know where Andrew is.
I'll send that message to Andrew.
Robert wants to connect.
Andrew accepts.
Then it's going to basically give up allthe information about Robert's location,
(11:58):
and it will try to make that
connection peer to peer,which might take, as I call it, the birds.
As the bird flies through the internet,the shortest path.
That's what the internet should donaturally,
should make a peer to peer connection.
If it can't,
then you might see Source Connect,say switching over to Source Stream.
At that point, you guys would bothbe going through Singapore,
(12:19):
which technically adds latency
because now you bothhave to go all the way
to Singaporeand back to talk to each other. Right?
But the only reason why that would behappening is to satisfy a firewall
or security issue.
Not because it's actually technicallybetter to add this mileage
to the connection.
So you're not alwaysgoing through our servers.
We try to always find the shortest path.
(12:41):
So then okay,so now we know what causes it.
How can we deal with it.
So Source Connect threeyou would have your ports forwarded.
And that would very much guaranteethat you'd get a peer to peer connection.
If both sides have their ports forwarded
you're going to get a peerto peer connection
as long as you don't have that user streamcheckbox selected.
Which would force it to use the streamingserver again.
(13:03):
That's the best way.
But port forwarding has justbecome untenable for a number of reasons.
One of the biggest reasonsis especially with the NBN,
I've seen thisand really with more and more countries,
in the United States,if you have a cellular connection,
you're not going
to get an internet connection that putsyou directly on the public internet
(13:25):
and most of the internet connectionsthat the NBN provides,
as far as I've noticed, do not put youdirectly on the public internet,
so you can't do port forwardingunless you have a direct connection
to the public internet.
If you don't have a direct connectionto the public internet, basically
what you have is an internet serviceprovider that corrals all their users
into one massive little private network,and then lets them all
(13:48):
get to the public internet through onepoint of presence, essentially.
And they save money,they save IP addresses this way and costs.
So you can think of it, the differenceof living in a city directly on the grid,
or living in the little community
where all the houseshave all their private roads.
But to get out to the road anywhere elsebesides the group of houses,
(14:10):
you have to go through that one roadthat puts you on the public road
compared to the HOA.
So most
internet service providers are stickingeveryone B inside their HOA now.
Therefore, you can't do port forwardingand port forwarding is a pain in the butt.
Usually.
Source CNet can try to figure its wayout of those networks and still establish
(14:32):
a port, a peer to peer connection,even without a port forward.
But it's not guaranteed,because a lot has to do with.
Yeah, it gets really technical,but essentially a really strong firewall.
A router would realize that it's
having a conversation with our serverand that's using a port.
And then Robbo comes in and says, hey,let me send data in to Andrew
(14:54):
on that same port.
And a good firewall would say, Yeah.
See you. Later.
I'm not fallen for that.
Like,like you're not the person I'm talking to.
Whereas a weakerfirewall would let us kind of like,
stick our foot in the door and thenlet Rob go in through that same port.
There's advantagesto those weak firewalls,
but there's also,of course, obviously disadvantages.
(15:16):
So ultimately
it's these days,you know, compared to the early 2000s,
it's just not possibleto port forward the world anymore.
And so the whole service has gotten
more expensive
to provide for these reasons,because you have to rely on a whole global
network of servers, even moreso to be able to make all this work.
(15:38):
But yeah,that's how it establishes its connection.
And you don't know, like,you could have a situation where
two people who live in the same citybecause of the firewall
as they can't connect with each other,
and even though they're only one houseaway from each other,
might have to bouncethrough a relay server,
it's hundreds of miles awayfrom the two of them.
(15:59):
But not ideal, but sort of.
That's how it goes.
So it's connectfour does a pretty good job, right?
Well, it doesn't need portforwarding anymore and it has a much more.
It has a larger system of globalservers to get through. And
yeah.
So in the sense it's betterbecause it doesn't rely on port
forwarding so much and it's a little bitmore intelligent about Source connect
(16:20):
three sometimes would end upin a situation where it,
for example, there's a system called UPnPor it's called Universal
Plug and Play, and that'swhere the software asks for a port.
And then the router opens up that portfor the software, which is great.
But then what people dois they get service from say,
(16:42):
Comcast Internet, and then they goover to BestBuy and they buy a Euro router
and they hook up this Wi-Fi thingto their whole house.
So what they've done isthey've put a router inside of a router,
they've basically createdthe turducken of networks.
And you have firewalls inside of firewallsliterally.
Or you know, so UPnP says, hey,you have a port, but it doesn't know
(17:04):
about the next router layeroutside of that, which blocks the port.
And source connectdoesn't know about that.
So then Source Connect doesn't knowat least first connect three wasn't
as quickor good about figuring out like, oh,
I don't really have UPnP,I don't really have a port.
I thought,I have a port, and that's where,
so sometimes you would have
(17:25):
those connections that didn't workas fluidly, and you'd have to tell it
to switch over to source stream sourceconnect four is a little bit.
It's a lot better about figuring outwhen when it needs to switch over.
What about Wi-Fi boosters like,you know, I've got in this house
because the modem is actuallyin the studio here, which is not.
Typically add a layer.
(17:45):
So some of them add a layeror some of them don't.
It depends on how they're set up.
George, you'd actually knowmore about those I think, than I do,
but sometimes they they literallypresent themselves as your first router
is 1921681.1 and the internet boosters
1921682.1.
That change in that second
number is a whole nother network layerthat's called the subnet.
(18:10):
And now you've.
Yeah. Shit complicated.There's new router.
Well there's modern routersnow that have mesh
Wi-Fi router, mesh Wi-Fi extenders.
And the nice thing about mesh stuffis they do extend the same IP
address across your home.
But they have tobe they all have to work together, right?
(18:30):
You can't just.
And the mesh has to be your thing,but you have to hook up
your internet connectiondirectly to the head unit of the mesh.
If not the whole.
If not, the whole mesh becomes a layer.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
It's yeah, it's it gets messy quick.
Even in my little 800 square footapartment I have, I have a router,
(18:50):
a power overEthernet extender to go to the living room
which is ten feet away,but our house is made out of chicken wire.
Yeah.
The entire thing is a Faraday cage, right?
And that goes out to the living room,and then it goes
from there to the kitchen to another Poe.
Oh, no.
It goes through, through the walls.
And then it goes from there to the kitchento another to the other Poe.
(19:14):
Then it goes to another networkextender out there,
which is on a different subnet, completelyto get to my webcam out in the garage.
Right.
And that's the kind of thingyou have to do sometimes.
But if your network is, for example,there's one brand of router called Eero,
not necessarily my favorite,but they are friendly to use.
(19:34):
The, let me let me make one complaintabout know
the only place you can managethat thing is on your stupid cell world.
Oh, wow.
Okay. Yeah. So annoying.
That's what I don't like.
And I think they do itfor security reasons.
It's easier to secure it.
Probably over a mobile.
It makes it really hardto tech support for people.
It is really a nuisance. Yeah.
(19:55):
For you guys to help somebody on an Eeroand have to talk them through
how to do it. On their ownwhile talking to them on their phone.
It's not nearly. Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
You set up a. Screen shareand then you're like, wait.
You're like, oh, screen trainer computer,let me jump in your router.
Zero.
You're like,oh God, okay, pick up your cell phone.
What do you see? Oh I. Don't know.
It says router.
It doesn't say router.No it says it's supposed to say router.
(20:16):
I don't see it because half the timethey don't even look.
Oh fine. Oh now I see it.Three minutes later. Yeah.
Like yeah.
Yeah I haven't got a year. I said, whatare you talking about? That wasn't me.
Okay. Yes.
I mean you want to look for like Synologyor Ubiquity.
Ubiquity is great ones. Yeah I like.
Like not that expensive and really,really reliable and easy to configure.
(20:38):
But yes, you got to be really carefulwith that stuff.
It can slow down your whole network.
Especially the ones that go Wi-Fito Wi-Fi.
So one of the things about the extendersI have a set of ubiquiti unify routers
and they're Wi-Fi hotspots,but they are meant
to be connectedto each other through Ethernet.
Yeah.
And therefore, because if not,what you have is like, anything
(21:02):
that's wireless has more latencythan anything that is wired.
And all these thingsthat are wirelessly extending things,
you have both the transmit,the the receive and the transmit
latency that you're adding to itbecause you're basically asking it to be,
access point and, receive
point wirelessly at the same time.
(21:23):
It's, you know, it's being both ends of itsimultaneously.
I bought years ago, the, Apple AirPods.
So they, you know, they plug into the plugin the wall and then fire off Wi-Fi.
So basically, my setup is like an Ethernetcable connected to the modem in here.
Underground, then into the house.
And then there's a whole bunch of Ethernetplugs all through the house.
(21:46):
Nice, nice. Yeah.
That's what happenswhen you build your own house.
Yeah, definitely. Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because because the power over theor the Ethernet over the power system
and I've seen mixed, mixed resultswith those things.
Yeah.
Like they,they don't they slow things down.
I think that we talk about the latencyon the, on the computer
(22:09):
and where the delay betweenthe add converter to the computer to it.
And so I was getting that. Yeah.
All of that.I tried going over that at the beginning.
ProTools. Yeah. ProToolsnative in how it's.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like that really mattersfor people playing in sync.
Right. Like mainly music.
Like if you're trying to play virtualinstruments, synthesizers,
(22:30):
all sorts of layers and have everythingline up so you don't have to manually.
Or if you want to. Right. Yeah. To vision.Well yeah.
I mean like like
like one thing to be really
clear on is like what is latencythat matters and doesn't matter.
So if you're looking at lip lip syncyou can have a little bit of tolerance
there.
20 milliseconds isn't going to makesomething look out of sync,
but 20 milliseconds at the right musicaltempo
(22:52):
is the differencebetween a good player and a bad player.
Right.
I always used to laugh at these systems
that claim to let you play musicover the internet and when you would.
Oh, go, go companies. Yeah, listen.
Excuse me, but bullshit.
So you read the manual and at some pointthey would say things like, you know, once
you get it all hooked up and you've drivenall your drivers
(23:13):
down to the lowest latency,so everything's as unstable as possible,
you will get used to playing with latency
and it works better with slowertempo music.
Like it works.
Betterif the other band members are in your.
Yeah, yeah, it works. Betterif no one has a sense of.
Time. What about Ringo Starr?
Right?
Ringo Starr's in-built latency gave hima name is one of the world's
(23:35):
greatest drummers because he's naturally,let's call it feel.
Yeah. And his grandmothermade him learn to get right.
But it took himlonger to get to the snare drum
because of the wayhe learned to play the drums,
and that gave him that naturalswing that everyone goes, oh,
George of stufflike Ringo is a fucking genius.
Yeah, yeah, no,but it was like it was just. A but.
Inbuilt latency that he wasn't.
(23:55):
But here's another point of latency.
Why do orchestras have conductors?
Because
again, at the right tempo,the amount of time it takes
for the double basseson one side of the orchestra to hear
and see what the percussionist is doing onthe other side of the orchestra
is a musical time value.
It might be a 64th note,
(24:17):
but it's their speed of light conductorwaving their hands.
Now you can get everyone to play in sync,but you know it's true.
Two peoplesitting on either end of a football field
at the speed of soundcannot play in sync with each other.
Yeah. It's impossible.Yeah, yeah, I remember that. We did that.
We did that, experiment at school.We we took a start.
Has gone up to one of the ovals at school.
(24:38):
And, you know, we all stood down one end
and the teacher was downthe other end with the started down.
And you saw that you saw the smokebefore you heard the sound.
Yeah. Well,that's sort of. Exactly where I saw it.
I don't like to say Pink Floyd.
I saw Dave Gilmore play in SoldierField here in Chicago,
and he played money,and he had the whole thing out in quad.
So doing church, bom bom bom bom,
(25:00):
and eachbeat would go to a different speaker.
Except I was about 20ft from one speaker
and about a 1500 feetfrom another speaker.
So that whole thing sounded like boom,chicka bom bom bom bom boom chicka boom.
Yeah.
What if you want a good lesson in latency,sit down with one of the guys that mics
those stadium events because like, you'redealing with that day in and day out.
(25:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
I actually had a totally different venue.
I watched a geeky video from thisgreat podcast called 20,000Hz.
They really it's a great show, by the way.
Free audio people.
Check out 20,000Hz.
And the gentleman,the gentleman, the host.
The show did.It's doing a video series now.
And he walked the Disney property.
(25:45):
Disneyland.
And the guy he was that took him onthe tour is an expert
on everything Disney technology, you know,
and he shows the guy whereall the hidden speakers are on the mall.
You know, as you walk down Main Streetwhere the speakers are located,
where the control, you know, controltowers are, where the audio mixer sitting.
(26:06):
But what was really cool,
what's relevant to the conversation,is talking about how they are masters
at controlling the delays of soundbetween systems, so that anywhere you are,
you never hear an overlapping echofrom another zone.
Well, yes.
Even to the point when they have parades,their old Electric Light parade,
which is so famous and fun, you know,they had the speakers on the parade car.
(26:29):
But nowadays
the technology, the system sounds,the sound is so much more sophisticated.
So these speakersall the way down the entire parade route,
and there's beacons and every single float
telling the system where the float is,
so it knows where the music for that floatshould be playing.
And and what? See,you know why it should be said to.
(26:49):
And so as the thing travels down,that's so cool.
No matter where you are,you're hearing the music for that float.
But it's coming from,you know, fixed speaker locations
and a lot of the speakers are hidden,but now they have speaker towers up
because you can only hide so many speakersnowadays.
They and they alwaysput them by the trees.
So there'll be a nice treeand then next to it, a big speaker tower.
(27:12):
But it's kind of disguised,you don't really know.
Looks like a. Business or something.
Yeah.
Say what you will about Disney,but they're geniuses at heart.
Are you sure? I mean, just incredible.
You know, the audio on and tronic,all that stuff is just next level.
But just talking about latency.
It's the most when you really twistyour head around what's going on.
(27:33):
And what's so remarkableis they do it so well.
And we all know this about sound, right?
You only know it's bad.
You onlynotice audio when it's fucking bad, right?
It's the most like unsung hero of tech.
Because when it's good I mean,unless you're somewhat of a enthusiast,
I'm like, oh, this sounds great, butmost of the time you don't say anything.
(27:56):
But when it'swhen it's. Bad, you're hiding. It.
You hate it.
So I think George Lucas linesound is 50% of the picture.
Yeah.
Yeah yeah yeah.
Or videowithout sound is just surveillance. Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah,I like that. Talk about video and latency.
Years and years and years ago,
I used to do a TV showwhich was live on a Friday night,
(28:17):
the music show,and it was before, Hi-Fi television.
So the big thing wasyou had an FM radio station, and you did
a thing called a simulcast
for anyone under 4515, somebody would haveno idea what I'm doing.
But anyway, so you had the audiocoming out of your Hi-Fi speakers
and the pictures on your television,so I should have the show.
(28:41):
But the problem wasbecause we had to rely on
the control roomback at the TV network to play the videos.
So I had on my chair under the right,a button.
But I had to work on, I think it was a
2 or 3 second roll from memory.
So when I'm doing my spiel,I had to work out,
(29:01):
you know, backwards 2or 3 seconds before I finished
so I could press the button, which alertedthe guys in the control room to rotate
at a time. The rotate,because in a three second roll.
No way. They roll in and then.
It's like the engine room in the ship,you know, you push the throttle forward
and then the downstairs,the light comes on full steam, you.
Know, and then you'd fire up this I used.
(29:22):
To have to deal with,
with the first version of Source Live,like back in 2014,
the latency to get a broadcastthat wasn't peer to peer,
it would take like three seconds.
So I'd talk to my clients and say,okay, well,
here's that thing that you asked for.
It's, you know, like, I lower the audio,I lower the music, I raise that
I got rid of that pop.
(29:43):
I hit play there, that play button isI just slam the button
and say a few more thingsand then it would play.
So hopefully when I said, hereit is, it would start.
But I really had hit play like a secondand a half or two seconds earlier,
trying to make it.
Seem like it's like my Subarutrying to pass a car on the freeway with.
This.
I'm like, I think I'm going to passthis guy in a minute.
(30:04):
I'll slam the throttle.
For the 1980s turbo car.
Well, you hit the throttle.
That's right.
At turbo.
Lag. Yeah, they should call itturbo latency.
Yeah.
It wasn't.
It was a turbo lag, wasn't it?That's what they call it.
Yeah. Turbo.
Yeah, yeah.
I tell you what, this does discussiondoes shine a really good light on it.
1996 or 97
(30:27):
would have been I was still at triple Mand we did a triple cast right?
Yeah, I remember the triple cast.
There was an Australian band calledBoom Crash Opera who was still around.
Now they're actually touring at them.
I remember them right.
Well, we had, a TV show, a nationalTV show called hey, Hey, It's Saturday,
which was on it's Saturday night,and it was like a national icon.
So we got boom.
(30:48):
So the triple M networklined up with, hey, hey, it's Saturday,
and we did a triple cast.
We had a band memberin each state, each capital city.
So I think Dale rider was a tripleM in Sydney with me.
And there was the guitarist in Adelaide,the drummer was somewhere,
blah blah blah blah blah.
And it was when the internetwas first starting up and they played live
(31:10):
on TV, on triple M and on the internet,so you could tune in and listen to them
playing on the internet,and they were all in a different state.
So we're talking back then
dial up connections, all that rubbish.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
The musicians were in threedifferent positions.
Were all those band members 4 or 5 in boomfresh?
Five? Oh, pleasant had gone by then,so I would have been four. I think.
(31:34):
I suppose it might be.
I'll tell you what it's on,but you can watch it.
It's on YouTube if you want to goand watch it, I'll stick the link.
They had to have been playing to a clickthat was synchronized
with the central point.There's no effing way.
Don't forget they were listening to the TVfeed to hear each other.
They weren't listening to each otheracross the internet, but it was correct.
They're all listen is something that has.
(31:55):
It was on all sides, right? Right,I tell you.
Broadcast,terrestrial terrestrial broadcast.
But still I mean, you know.
Yeah. Back then yeah it was a big thing.
That's pretty cool. Well, you were there.
You were there. Rob.
Oh. When,guild off used to come and do drive
in the.
Yeah.
And he,I got a call from a record company.
(32:16):
Go, girl, I was talking to her,and I said, what are you up to?
Some at lunch with Lee Amalia fromHothouse Flowers went, oh, he's Irish.
Why don't you come inand you can get on there with Geldof?
So he did,and then they end up doing a song member.
They did do the live song,
which was a Tim Buckley song,and I wish I could remember what it was,
but Liam Amalia played keyboards and sang.
(32:38):
Charlie Musselwhite was on harmonica.
Can't remember than a guy's namewho's playing guitar.
And I think Geldofsort of wandered it out,
playing the bow roleor some weird shit, but, But
Liam, Amalia, the headphones didn't workand we were going live to hear.
So he played the
keyboards, he couldn't hear the keyboard,and he sang.
(32:59):
Oh, wow.
But he played the keyboard.
Didn't miss a notewithout even hearing it. Yes.
That's somebody that was amazing, Mr.
Beethoven. Some of those guys.
Yeah.
I mean, my letI have one last latency story too,
because it ties into radio againwhen I did the Eagles football,
broadcasts, we were simulcastingbecause it was television,
(33:19):
but we were on the radio. Right.
And it's not technically a simulcast,but the fans in Philly
and in the Philadelphia areawanted to hear our announcer, you know.
Yeah, they want to hear the hometownannouncer. Right.
So it's very popular to turn downthe television and turn up the radio.
Right. Talk about sync problems.
What often happened waswe were ahead of the broadcast.
(33:43):
Yeah. Right, right.
And so you would get calls from the fanscalling in the station saying.
You guys are ahead of the TV, man.
And then we'd have to call into engineering.
And they had a delay control,you know, back at the.
Yeah, at the stationthey'd add a second 2 or 3 of delay
so that when you lose to the gamebecause you see when you hear male go,
(34:04):
it's just, you know, fumbleand the guy's still running
and they're like, it'sgoing to be a fumble. Oh shit.
Oh you bet. Yeah.
Yeah.
So you would have to deal with that,you know. And that.
Well if. You watch it.
If you watch film coverage,you'll see that all the time
because they'll, they'll cross thelike this the garage of whatever team.
And you see a screen in the background
(34:26):
which is showing somethingyou saw about four seconds ago.
And then it will turn to the guys in the,you know, in the in the garage
on the pit lane, two. More placeswhere latency comes up.
Number one, you buy these in houselike Sony's speakers,
and they are having to synchronizethe delay
throughout your houseso that you walk upstairs and downstairs
(34:47):
and you get somewhatof a continuous experience
without getting an echoey soundwhen you're standing between two zones.
That's one.
And that's very hard to do,especially because you're dealing
with physical space.
At some pointyou cannot actually compensate for this.
You can.
Only one thing to be really clear about.
(35:07):
You can only compensate for latency.
From a point of perspective, and you canonly compensate latency by adding latency.
There's no time travel like people havelatency compensation like. You.
Can't speed it up to.
Time travel yet.
Yeah. You can't you can't go back in time.
So that's one place.
The other thingthat's interesting with latency,
(35:28):
you might remember with landline
phone calls, they were quicker.
And now everyone is so used to latency
on the phone network with cell phonesthat the funniest thing
that I've realized, actually,is that recently I've been on a few phone
calls and Source Connectbeat the phone call.
(35:49):
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
Which was really interesting.
Well, everyonenow is this culturally used to much higher
latency conversationsthan we used to in the 80s with
wired telephones across the whole world.
Except when you were doing.The you're going. Through these.
I can still remember though, back inthe 70s and 80s, because I'm fucking old.
(36:12):
You know,you be doing an international call.
It'd be like, how are you?
Are you there? Yeah. Good.
Oh, no. I'm sorry.
And then everyone's talking over
one another and it's costingloads of money and.
Yeah, yeah.
God, Jesus.It's like a phone call. Oh, yeah.
I a half hour interviewat a radio station.
It cost the station,like 200 bucks or something. Yeah, yeah.
I see end lines go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(36:33):
Fucking. Oh yeah yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
God forbid someone forgot to hang upthe damn ISDN box.
Over the weekend, we we did thatwhen we were just, testing Source Connect,
and we were doing some latency testsbecause aptX for example, is a codec.
We were talking about compressionand decompression, and we used to have
a version of Source Connect that usethe aptX codec or people call it aptX X.
(36:56):
And now aptX is used a lot with Bluetoothfor doing your surround speakers
because it's it most codecs.
A codec is the thing that compressesthe data and makes it less data
to transmit.
Most codecs do thisby figuring out what you can't hear.
Is a human. But aptX didn't use,
perceptual coding.
(37:17):
It used, linear adaptive linear
PCM or something I think had ad, I forget.
But anyways, it was much, much faster.
What would take most codecs around20 milliseconds to encode decode?
I think aptX could do itin four milliseconds. Wow.
So we were testing with the aptX ISDN boxand comparing it to Source Connect.
(37:38):
Connect it to California.
We had some pretty good results
and then we just went homeand it was the weekend.
Yeah.
And the aptX system would takeit wouldn't take two ISDN lines.
It would take four because it it couldn'tachieve as much of a compression ratio.
It was much faster.
Who didn't disconnect?
Robert I'm. Innocent.
(38:01):
The box didn't disconnect.
The the line, the,
Oops.
That was an expensive,that was got to hang.
That was expensive.
That was that was almost $1,000 for thatone weekend.
Yeah.
Yeah, it happened to Miguel for our IP.
They left it open.
Yeah, yeah, nobody hung up.
(38:21):
The suit didn't hang up. Yeah.
And he he was the one that dialed in. Oh.
Which is not really protocol,but for whatever reason.
Boom. He dialed in. And got he got nailed.
He got the bill. Yeah. And he. Yeah.
My my, when when.
When I first set up the bridge,I bought a, used my, ISDN box,
and it came from some radio station.
It was set up as a studio,the transmitter link.
(38:43):
And it had a program in there that said,if you disconnect,
like dial backand get that connection back.
And I didn't know that,I didn't clear the settings out.
And I put my new ISDN numbers in there,and I did a bridge that dialed out.
And then like bridges overand I disconnected or whatever.
And I got home and that was like 300 bucksand that was just for like eight hours
(39:06):
or something or six hoursthat the stupid thing dialed back.
The moral to the story is, if you've gotan ISDN box and you forget to hang up,
you need to go to a CVS store right nowbecause you're going to need it.
And that's the out
literally.
Well, that's the that's is at the end.
(39:30):
Both.
Well that was fun.
Is it a works.
In the pro audio suite thanks to
tribal and Austrian audiorecorded using Source Connect,
edited by Andrew Peters and mix by RobertGood.
Your own audio issues,just ask Rob Aucoin.
(39:51):
Tech support for George the Tech William.
Don't forget to subscribe
to the show and join in the conversationon our Facebook group to leave a comment,
suggest a topic or just say goodbye,drop us a note at our website.
Rodeo swedish.com.
Get ready.
Be history. Get started.
Welcome.
Hi. Hi. Hi.
Hello, everyone, to the pro audio suite.
These guys are professional and motivated.
Please take the video. Stars.
George was a founder of Source Element.
Robert Marshall, international audioengineer Darren Robin
Roberts and global voice Andrew repeaters.
Thanks to tribal Austrian audio lighting,passionate elements George the tech
(00:22):
wisdom and Rob APIs international demosto find out more about us.
Jake the Proteas sweetcorn line up.
Ready? Here we go.
And welcome to another pro audio suitethanks to Triber.
Don't forget the code.
Try Pip 200 to get $200 off your try.
Booth and Austrian audiomaking your passion heard.
(00:44):
And like should you say there is somethingheading this way towards me?
That's me from Austrian audio.
Can't say anything yet, but, we'll begiving that a whirl in weeks to come.
And I'm a little bit excited.
I want to know. Can't tell you.
How I'm going to wonder that I'm goingto be completely distracted for this.
What?
(01:04):
It was just going to keep coming upwith random ideas through the episode.
Yeah, exactly. Going is it is it?
Yeah. Does it sound like.
Can you get it at CVS?
Yes, you can.
But it's under a plexus plexi.
Kits.
You have to get them to outopen it up for you.
(01:25):
Is it chocolate colored.
And there are no buts about it.
But anyway.
You had.
To be on the beginning of the show.Seriously.
Maybe we should do that for a,
We should put that out as the episode.
It's a Patreon, you know?
You want to hear the weird shit?
I said I'd like to. Get that. Joke.Yeah. Patreon.
(01:46):
I mean, the nice bit there is.
You know, we're now talking abouthearing things late, so there you go.
That probably sits.
Oh, it does indeed,because the latency is,
Well, I mean, everyone kind of knows
what latency is,but really do we know what latency is?
Well, I.
Think a lot of people are confused about.
What is. See, delay.
Let's let's start let's start with what?
(02:07):
It's not it's not echoing back.
Yeah.
Well, it kind of does.
I mean, I guess because, you know,if you like, you can sort of hear
ringing in other people'sheadphones and stuff. Right?
Echoing back is caused by latency,but latency is not echoing.
Best latency is what in its most basicform, latency is the time it takes your
audio signal to go through your systemto be processed digitally.
(02:28):
Sometimesit might be sent to another machine
and come back,and then it's got to go back into
whatever it is you're usingand then go back out.
So it's the time it takesis time for that process to happen.
Yeah. Latency is the time for a processto take place.
Yeah, exactly.
And sometimes for me to understandwhat you just said.
Yeah.
So like say, look, I mean, biggest place
I know the city's on sourceconnect sessions when I'm working with
(02:50):
maybe doing a voice over demowith or recording someone in the States.
Right.
Because it's got to get to mefrom the States and source connects
for to do it sync.
And you can talk moreabout what happens there Robert.
And then it's got to go from me.
I've got to sort of re spot,I've got to respond.
And then it's got to go backthrough that same process back to right.
Yeah. That's gone.
So that's a round trip. So that's. A real.
(03:12):
Classic latency.
The classic latencyjoke is the guy who's like at the like,
you know, the war correspondentout in the field in the control room.
Just like what's it like out there.
Oh yes Kenny.
Yeah. Yeah. It is really awful out here.
It's there on a satellite.
Q then it's going to be 3 or 4 second to.
(03:33):
Right? Yeah.
So so what what sort of thingsare happening inside a plugin.
Let's talk about for example,Inside Source Connect.
Without giving away any trade secrets,why does like for me it's
you know, I would sort of think, well,it's only got to sort of shoot
through this,you know, this computer thing.
Why does it take so longto get through there?
So there's latency all over the place.
(03:53):
Even if you've ever connectedyour audio interface and you hear yourself
like some computer software letsyou monitor yourself through the software,
and when you do, you might hear a little
like shadowing or a very quick, very,very short echo of yourself.
A musician would call it a flam.
Or ProTools is a classic example of this,because unless you use low
(04:16):
latency monitoring in the native version,you have a.
Stream. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
So then you're going to hear yourselfthrough all the buffering that occurs
where your audio interface collectsthe data.
That's one process in the audiointerface computer.
It hands it off to ProTools,ProTools records it.
Maybe ProTools even has to pass itthrough a few plugins
(04:39):
that you have on that channel.
That's also more time to,you know, to process those plugins.
And then outit goes back to your headphones.
So every DAW has a usuallysome sort of buffer.
And it's the classic thingwhere if you lower the buffer
you're going to have less latency.
It'll soundlike you're having less of a flam,
(04:59):
but then you're going to make itless stable because the computer
has less time to apply to doall these processes that it needs to.
And if it can't get them all done in time,
depending on how the software handles it,it might just stop what it's doing
and throw an error message up and say,oh, I had an error,
or it might not throwthe error message up,
but it might make all the audiosound like garbage.
(05:20):
It just depends on how the softwaredecides to handle that state.
So there's time it takes just locally
to get the audio into your computerand then into the software,
be it Pro Tools or Source Connect or Zoomor whatever it is.
It has to digitize the audioso it has a converted from a voltage to
(05:41):
to a digital signal,and then has to take that digital signal,
get it into the computer software,into the computer software.
The computer software has to do somethingwith it.
EQ compression, who knows.
In the case of Source Connect,what it's doing is
it's taking that audio data,which is a lot of audio data,
and it's putting awith a data compression on it.
(06:01):
That's not like audio compressionin terms of dynamic range.
It's compressing the audio to remove
what it knowsyou can't hear as a human, so that it can
then send less data without losingaudio quality across the internet.
So that time it takes to compressthe audio, data wise takes,
(06:23):
only a few milliseconds.
You know, 20 millisecondsactually, or something.
I think it might be less.
I think it's 20 millisecondsto compress it and decompress it.
The real time
that, no pun intended that occurs is inhauling it over the internet.
So there's a few other stepsthat connect has to take before
it gets it on the internet.
It then has to take chunksof those of that audio
(06:46):
and has to chop it upinto what's called the packet.
Think of that as likehas to put the audio in a box
so that that box can besent over the internet.
Because the internet doesn't workin continuous streams of data,
it works in packets or chunks of data.
So you have to take your audio.
That's rather continuous,chop it up into chunks or packets,
(07:09):
and then send those packets acrossthe internet, receive those packets.
And so when you receive the packets,you have to have another buffer
because you need to make surethat you get all those packets in order.
When you start sending them out,
you don't know how they're goingto go across the internet.
And sometimes some of themmight take a slightly different route
depending on how the internet,the internet's, self deterministic,
(07:30):
how it decides to deliverdata from point A to point B,
so the buffer on the receiving sideis what the
what gives the system time to make surethat it has all the packets in order
so that it can play them outwithout a hiccup or a drop out,
and then it receives all those packets,it gets them in order,
plays them out, decompresses them,and then reverses everything.
(07:54):
So it decompresses that makes themthe big string of audio hands that,
to your audio softwarethat's playing it out.
Again, in this case, it'ssort of connect off to the audio card,
which has a little small buffer in it,and then out to your headphones.
So and so all of that, depending onwhere you are, it can take a varied amount
of time, anywhere from 300 millisecondsto possibly around a half second or.
(08:16):
So with, with the internet,because we always
assume is like point A to point B,and that's it.
There's nothing in between.But it doesn't work that way, does it?
Because sometimes it'll veer off it offsome other direction.
Right.
So there's all the way the internet worksis there's these many different series.
Yeah. I don't know.
It's there's many, many, many differentinternet service providers out there.
(08:38):
And they all dowhat's called peer together.
So what makes the internet workis that all
providers on the internethave to peer with each other.
And this is where you get your issueswith net neutrality and whatnot,
because they should all dealwith each other's
data with the same priority,but they don't necessarily do that.
They really give all of each otherthe lowest priority technically.
(09:02):
So for example, AT&T, if it has datafrom its own network, it's going to pass
that data to the next hop before it passesdata from, say, T-Mobile or Verizon.
So the internet's built off
of these many, many different providersin the in the United States,
you have what's called the tier one or,you know, tier one providers.
(09:23):
And usually at some point,if you're connecting from one carrier
to another, at some pointyou end up going down
all the way down to a tierone provider and back up,
so many local carriersmight be many tiers up from a tier one.
But in theory, if you and your connectionpartner were on AT&T, if AT&T was doing
everything really perfectly,the data would never leave AT&T network.
(09:47):
That's not to say it doesn't hop acrossmany different nodes on AT&T network.
So AT&T also would peer with itself.
You know, you're in New York.
The person you're connectingwith is in, say LA.
Your signal might go
probably down through Texas,through some of various servers
(10:08):
and, you know, like Houstonand maybe over in Colorado or New Mexico.
And eventually it's just sort ofhopscotching across the country
from one peering point to the otheruntil it gets to the end endpoint.
So with with source connect the justsource elements where your service based.
So we have relay servers.
So normally source connect
(10:29):
first going to try to createwhat's called a peer to peer connection
which AT&T or the providerwould figure out that route for you.
But if your firewallscan't trust each other,
then you have to have the data comingfrom a trusted point.
And that would be our servers.
So we have servers throughout the globe.
I forget exactly where at this point,
(10:51):
because we've expanded, but we at least atone point had two in Europe,
I think three
in the United States and one in Asiaat least.
Yeah.
Those were that was in the pandemic.
We had like 5 or 6 points.I think we have more now.
But if we like I'm just thinkinglike, for instance, if I'm sitting here,
where I'm in Victoria in Australia
and I'm connecting with Rob in Sydney,
(11:14):
with which service do I pass throughto get to Sydney from here?
Would I go overseas? You might.
You might go all the way to SingaporeI think is where I think are
apex servers areI think they're in the Singapore area.
So if you were connecting peer
to peer, your connection might never leaveAustralia.
The servers serve two purposes.
(11:35):
One is a meet and greet.
So you both log in to the serverand you have no idea where each other are.
And Robbo sends a message to Andrewthat says, hey, I want to connect.
That message goes to the server and theserver says, oh, I know where Andrew is.
I'll send that message to Andrew.
Robert wants to connect.
Andrew accepts.
Then it's going to basically give up allthe information about Robert's location,
(11:58):
and it will try to make that
connection peer to peer,which might take, as I call it, the birds.
As the bird flies through the internet,the shortest path.
That's what the internet should donaturally,
should make a peer to peer connection.
If it can't,
then you might see Source Connect,say switching over to Source Stream.
At that point, you guys would bothbe going through Singapore,
(12:19):
which technically adds latency
because now you bothhave to go all the way
to Singaporeand back to talk to each other. Right?
But the only reason why that would behappening is to satisfy a firewall
or security issue.
Not because it's actually technicallybetter to add this mileage
to the connection.
So you're not alwaysgoing through our servers.
We try to always find the shortest path.
(12:41):
So then okay,so now we know what causes it.
How can we deal with it.
So Source Connect threeyou would have your ports forwarded.
And that would very much guaranteethat you'd get a peer to peer connection.
If both sides have their ports forwarded
you're going to get a peerto peer connection
as long as you don't have that user streamcheckbox selected.
Which would force it to use the streamingserver again.
(13:03):
That's the best way.
But port forwarding has justbecome untenable for a number of reasons.
One of the biggest reasonsis especially with the NBN,
I've seen thisand really with more and more countries,
in the United States,if you have a cellular connection,
you're not going
to get an internet connection that putsyou directly on the public internet
(13:25):
and most of the internet connectionsthat the NBN provides,
as far as I've noticed, do not put youdirectly on the public internet,
so you can't do port forwardingunless you have a direct connection
to the public internet.
If you don't have a direct connectionto the public internet, basically
what you have is an internet serviceprovider that corrals all their users
into one massive little private network,and then lets them all
(13:48):
get to the public internet through onepoint of presence, essentially.
And they save money,they save IP addresses this way and costs.
So you can think of it, the differenceof living in a city directly on the grid,
or living in the little community
where all the houseshave all their private roads.
But to get out to the road anywhere elsebesides the group of houses,
(14:10):
you have to go through that one roadthat puts you on the public road
compared to the HOA.
So most
internet service providers are stickingeveryone B inside their HOA now.
Therefore, you can't do port forwardingand port forwarding is a pain in the butt.
Usually.
Source CNet can try to figure its wayout of those networks and still establish
(14:32):
a port, a peer to peer connection,even without a port forward.
But it's not guaranteed,because a lot has to do with.
Yeah, it gets really technical,but essentially a really strong firewall.
A router would realize that it's
having a conversation with our serverand that's using a port.
And then Robbo comes in and says, hey,let me send data in to Andrew
(14:54):
on that same port.
And a good firewall would say, Yeah.
See you. Later.
I'm not fallen for that.
Like,like you're not the person I'm talking to.
Whereas a weakerfirewall would let us kind of like,
stick our foot in the door and thenlet Rob go in through that same port.
There's advantagesto those weak firewalls,
but there's also,of course, obviously disadvantages.
(15:16):
So ultimately
it's these days,you know, compared to the early 2000s,
it's just not possibleto port forward the world anymore.
And so the whole service has gotten
more expensive
to provide for these reasons,because you have to rely on a whole global
network of servers, even moreso to be able to make all this work.
(15:38):
But yeah,that's how it establishes its connection.
And you don't know, like,you could have a situation where
two people who live in the same citybecause of the firewall
as they can't connect with each other,
and even though they're only one houseaway from each other,
might have to bouncethrough a relay server,
it's hundreds of miles awayfrom the two of them.
(15:59):
But not ideal, but sort of.
That's how it goes.
So it's connectfour does a pretty good job, right?
Well, it doesn't need portforwarding anymore and it has a much more.
It has a larger system of globalservers to get through. And
yeah.
So in the sense it's betterbecause it doesn't rely on port
forwarding so much and it's a little bitmore intelligent about Source connect
(16:20):
three sometimes would end upin a situation where it,
for example, there's a system called UPnPor it's called Universal
Plug and Play, and that'swhere the software asks for a port.
And then the router opens up that portfor the software, which is great.
But then what people dois they get service from say,
(16:42):
Comcast Internet, and then they goover to BestBuy and they buy a Euro router
and they hook up this Wi-Fi thingto their whole house.
So what they've done isthey've put a router inside of a router,
they've basically createdthe turducken of networks.
And you have firewalls inside of firewallsliterally.
Or you know, so UPnP says, hey,you have a port, but it doesn't know
(17:04):
about the next router layeroutside of that, which blocks the port.
And source connectdoesn't know about that.
So then Source Connect doesn't knowat least first connect three wasn't
as quickor good about figuring out like, oh,
I don't really have UPnP,I don't really have a port.
I thought,I have a port, and that's where,
so sometimes you would have
(17:25):
those connections that didn't workas fluidly, and you'd have to tell it
to switch over to source stream sourceconnect four is a little bit.
It's a lot better about figuring outwhen when it needs to switch over.
What about Wi-Fi boosters like,you know, I've got in this house
because the modem is actuallyin the studio here, which is not.
Typically add a layer.
(17:45):
So some of them add a layeror some of them don't.
It depends on how they're set up.
George, you'd actually knowmore about those I think, than I do,
but sometimes they they literallypresent themselves as your first router
is 1921681.1 and the internet boosters
1921682.1.
That change in that second
number is a whole nother network layerthat's called the subnet.
(18:10):
And now you've.
Yeah. Shit complicated.There's new router.
Well there's modern routersnow that have mesh
Wi-Fi router, mesh Wi-Fi extenders.
And the nice thing about mesh stuffis they do extend the same IP
address across your home.
But they have tobe they all have to work together, right?
(18:30):
You can't just.
And the mesh has to be your thing,but you have to hook up
your internet connectiondirectly to the head unit of the mesh.
If not the whole.
If not, the whole mesh becomes a layer.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
It's yeah, it's it gets messy quick.
Even in my little 800 square footapartment I have, I have a router,
(18:50):
a power overEthernet extender to go to the living room
which is ten feet away,but our house is made out of chicken wire.
Yeah.
The entire thing is a Faraday cage, right?
And that goes out to the living room,and then it goes
from there to the kitchen to another Poe.
Oh, no.
It goes through, through the walls.
And then it goes from there to the kitchento another to the other Poe.
(19:14):
Then it goes to another networkextender out there,
which is on a different subnet, completelyto get to my webcam out in the garage.
Right.
And that's the kind of thingyou have to do sometimes.
But if your network is, for example,there's one brand of router called Eero,
not necessarily my favorite,but they are friendly to use.
(19:34):
The, let me let me make one complaintabout know
the only place you can managethat thing is on your stupid cell world.
Oh, wow.
Okay. Yeah. So annoying.
That's what I don't like.
And I think they do itfor security reasons.
It's easier to secure it.
Probably over a mobile.
It makes it really hardto tech support for people.
It is really a nuisance. Yeah.
(19:55):
For you guys to help somebody on an Eeroand have to talk them through
how to do it. On their ownwhile talking to them on their phone.
It's not nearly. Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
You set up a. Screen shareand then you're like, wait.
You're like, oh, screen trainer computer,let me jump in your router.
Zero.
You're like,oh God, okay, pick up your cell phone.
What do you see? Oh I. Don't know.
It says router.
It doesn't say router.No it says it's supposed to say router.
(20:16):
I don't see it because half the timethey don't even look.
Oh fine. Oh now I see it.Three minutes later. Yeah.
Like yeah.
Yeah I haven't got a year. I said, whatare you talking about? That wasn't me.
Okay. Yes.
I mean you want to look for like Synologyor Ubiquity.
Ubiquity is great ones. Yeah I like.
Like not that expensive and really,really reliable and easy to configure.
(20:38):
But yes, you got to be really carefulwith that stuff.
It can slow down your whole network.
Especially the ones that go Wi-Fito Wi-Fi.
So one of the things about the extendersI have a set of ubiquiti unify routers
and they're Wi-Fi hotspots,but they are meant
to be connectedto each other through Ethernet.
Yeah.
And therefore, because if not,what you have is like, anything
(21:02):
that's wireless has more latencythan anything that is wired.
And all these thingsthat are wirelessly extending things,
you have both the transmit,the the receive and the transmit
latency that you're adding to itbecause you're basically asking it to be,
access point and, receive
point wirelessly at the same time.
(21:23):
It's, you know, it's being both ends of itsimultaneously.
I bought years ago, the, Apple AirPods.
So they, you know, they plug into the plugin the wall and then fire off Wi-Fi.
So basically, my setup is like an Ethernetcable connected to the modem in here.
Underground, then into the house.
And then there's a whole bunch of Ethernetplugs all through the house.
(21:46):
Nice, nice. Yeah.
That's what happenswhen you build your own house.
Yeah, definitely. Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because because the power over theor the Ethernet over the power system
and I've seen mixed, mixed resultswith those things.
Yeah.
Like they,they don't they slow things down.
I think that we talk about the latencyon the, on the computer
(22:09):
and where the delay betweenthe add converter to the computer to it.
And so I was getting that. Yeah.
All of that.I tried going over that at the beginning.
ProTools. Yeah. ProToolsnative in how it's.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like that really mattersfor people playing in sync.
Right. Like mainly music.
Like if you're trying to play virtualinstruments, synthesizers,
(22:30):
all sorts of layers and have everythingline up so you don't have to manually.
Or if you want to. Right. Yeah. To vision.Well yeah.
I mean like like
like one thing to be really
clear on is like what is latencythat matters and doesn't matter.
So if you're looking at lip lip syncyou can have a little bit of tolerance
there.
20 milliseconds isn't going to makesomething look out of sync,
but 20 milliseconds at the right musicaltempo
(22:52):
is the differencebetween a good player and a bad player.
Right.
I always used to laugh at these systems
that claim to let you play musicover the internet and when you would.
Oh, go, go companies. Yeah, listen.
Excuse me, but bullshit.
So you read the manual and at some pointthey would say things like, you know, once
you get it all hooked up and you've drivenall your drivers
(23:13):
down to the lowest latency,so everything's as unstable as possible,
you will get used to playing with latency
and it works better with slowertempo music.
Like it works.
Betterif the other band members are in your.
Yeah, yeah, it works. Betterif no one has a sense of.
Time. What about Ringo Starr?
Right?
Ringo Starr's in-built latency gave hima name is one of the world's
(23:35):
greatest drummers because he's naturally,let's call it feel.
Yeah. And his grandmothermade him learn to get right.
But it took himlonger to get to the snare drum
because of the wayhe learned to play the drums,
and that gave him that naturalswing that everyone goes, oh,
George of stufflike Ringo is a fucking genius.
Yeah, yeah, no,but it was like it was just. A but.
Inbuilt latency that he wasn't.
(23:55):
But here's another point of latency.
Why do orchestras have conductors?
Because
again, at the right tempo,the amount of time it takes
for the double basseson one side of the orchestra to hear
and see what the percussionist is doing onthe other side of the orchestra
is a musical time value.
It might be a 64th note,
(24:17):
but it's their speed of light conductorwaving their hands.
Now you can get everyone to play in sync,but you know it's true.
Two peoplesitting on either end of a football field
at the speed of soundcannot play in sync with each other.
Yeah. It's impossible.Yeah, yeah, I remember that. We did that.
We did that, experiment at school.We we took a start.
Has gone up to one of the ovals at school.
(24:38):
And, you know, we all stood down one end
and the teacher was downthe other end with the started down.
And you saw that you saw the smokebefore you heard the sound.
Yeah. Well,that's sort of. Exactly where I saw it.
I don't like to say Pink Floyd.
I saw Dave Gilmore play in SoldierField here in Chicago,
and he played money,and he had the whole thing out in quad.
So doing church, bom bom bom bom,
(25:00):
and eachbeat would go to a different speaker.
Except I was about 20ft from one speaker
and about a 1500 feetfrom another speaker.
So that whole thing sounded like boom,chicka bom bom bom bom boom chicka boom.
Yeah.
What if you want a good lesson in latency,sit down with one of the guys that mics
those stadium events because like, you'redealing with that day in and day out.
(25:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
I actually had a totally different venue.
I watched a geeky video from thisgreat podcast called 20,000Hz.
They really it's a great show, by the way.
Free audio people.
Check out 20,000Hz.
And the gentleman,the gentleman, the host.
The show did.It's doing a video series now.
And he walked the Disney property.
(25:45):
Disneyland.
And the guy he was that took him onthe tour is an expert
on everything Disney technology, you know,
and he shows the guy whereall the hidden speakers are on the mall.
You know, as you walk down Main Streetwhere the speakers are located,
where the control, you know, controltowers are, where the audio mixer sitting.
(26:06):
But what was really cool,
what's relevant to the conversation,is talking about how they are masters
at controlling the delays of soundbetween systems, so that anywhere you are,
you never hear an overlapping echofrom another zone.
Well, yes.
Even to the point when they have parades,their old Electric Light parade,
which is so famous and fun, you know,they had the speakers on the parade car.
(26:29):
But nowadays
the technology, the system sounds,the sound is so much more sophisticated.
So these speakersall the way down the entire parade route,
and there's beacons and every single float
telling the system where the float is,
so it knows where the music for that floatshould be playing.
And and what? See,you know why it should be said to.
(26:49):
And so as the thing travels down,that's so cool.
No matter where you are,you're hearing the music for that float.
But it's coming from,you know, fixed speaker locations
and a lot of the speakers are hidden,but now they have speaker towers up
because you can only hide so many speakersnowadays.
They and they alwaysput them by the trees.
So there'll be a nice treeand then next to it, a big speaker tower.
(27:12):
But it's kind of disguised,you don't really know.
Looks like a. Business or something.
Yeah.
Say what you will about Disney,but they're geniuses at heart.
Are you sure? I mean, just incredible.
You know, the audio on and tronic,all that stuff is just next level.
But just talking about latency.
It's the most when you really twistyour head around what's going on.
(27:33):
And what's so remarkableis they do it so well.
And we all know this about sound, right?
You only know it's bad.
You onlynotice audio when it's fucking bad, right?
It's the most like unsung hero of tech.
Because when it's good I mean,unless you're somewhat of a enthusiast,
I'm like, oh, this sounds great, butmost of the time you don't say anything.
(27:56):
But when it'swhen it's. Bad, you're hiding. It.
You hate it.
So I think George Lucas linesound is 50% of the picture.
Yeah.
Yeah yeah yeah.
Or videowithout sound is just surveillance. Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah,I like that. Talk about video and latency.
Years and years and years ago,
I used to do a TV showwhich was live on a Friday night,
(28:17):
the music show,and it was before, Hi-Fi television.
So the big thing wasyou had an FM radio station, and you did
a thing called a simulcast
for anyone under 4515, somebody would haveno idea what I'm doing.
But anyway, so you had the audiocoming out of your Hi-Fi speakers
and the pictures on your television,so I should have the show.
(28:41):
But the problem wasbecause we had to rely on
the control roomback at the TV network to play the videos.
So I had on my chair under the right,a button.
But I had to work on, I think it was a
2 or 3 second roll from memory.
So when I'm doing my spiel,I had to work out,
(29:01):
you know, backwards 2or 3 seconds before I finished
so I could press the button, which alertedthe guys in the control room to rotate
at a time. The rotate,because in a three second roll.
No way. They roll in and then.
It's like the engine room in the ship,you know, you push the throttle forward
and then the downstairs,the light comes on full steam, you.
Know, and then you'd fire up this I used.
(29:22):
To have to deal with,
with the first version of Source Live,like back in 2014,
the latency to get a broadcastthat wasn't peer to peer,
it would take like three seconds.
So I'd talk to my clients and say,okay, well,
here's that thing that you asked for.
It's, you know, like, I lower the audio,I lower the music, I raise that
I got rid of that pop.
(29:43):
I hit play there, that play button isI just slam the button
and say a few more thingsand then it would play.
So hopefully when I said, hereit is, it would start.
But I really had hit play like a secondand a half or two seconds earlier,
trying to make it.
Seem like it's like my Subarutrying to pass a car on the freeway with.
This.
I'm like, I think I'm going to passthis guy in a minute.
(30:04):
I'll slam the throttle.
For the 1980s turbo car.
Well, you hit the throttle.
That's right.
At turbo.
Lag. Yeah, they should call itturbo latency.
Yeah.
It wasn't.
It was a turbo lag, wasn't it?That's what they call it.
Yeah. Turbo.
Yeah, yeah.
I tell you what, this does discussiondoes shine a really good light on it.
1996 or 97
(30:27):
would have been I was still at triple Mand we did a triple cast right?
Yeah, I remember the triple cast.
There was an Australian band calledBoom Crash Opera who was still around.
Now they're actually touring at them.
I remember them right.
Well, we had, a TV show, a nationalTV show called hey, Hey, It's Saturday,
which was on it's Saturday night,and it was like a national icon.
So we got boom.
(30:48):
So the triple M networklined up with, hey, hey, it's Saturday,
and we did a triple cast.
We had a band memberin each state, each capital city.
So I think Dale rider was a tripleM in Sydney with me.
And there was the guitarist in Adelaide,the drummer was somewhere,
blah blah blah blah blah.
And it was when the internetwas first starting up and they played live
(31:10):
on TV, on triple M and on the internet,so you could tune in and listen to them
playing on the internet,and they were all in a different state.
So we're talking back then
dial up connections, all that rubbish.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
The musicians were in threedifferent positions.
Were all those band members 4 or 5 in boomfresh?
Five? Oh, pleasant had gone by then,so I would have been four. I think.
(31:34):
I suppose it might be.
I'll tell you what it's on,but you can watch it.
It's on YouTube if you want to goand watch it, I'll stick the link.
They had to have been playing to a clickthat was synchronized
with the central point.There's no effing way.
Don't forget they were listening to the TVfeed to hear each other.
They weren't listening to each otheracross the internet, but it was correct.
They're all listen is something that has.
(31:55):
It was on all sides, right? Right,I tell you.
Broadcast,terrestrial terrestrial broadcast.
But still I mean, you know.
Yeah. Back then yeah it was a big thing.
That's pretty cool. Well, you were there.
You were there. Rob.
Oh. When,guild off used to come and do drive
in the.
Yeah.
And he,I got a call from a record company.
(32:16):
Go, girl, I was talking to her,and I said, what are you up to?
Some at lunch with Lee Amalia fromHothouse Flowers went, oh, he's Irish.
Why don't you come inand you can get on there with Geldof?
So he did,and then they end up doing a song member.
They did do the live song,
which was a Tim Buckley song,and I wish I could remember what it was,
but Liam Amalia played keyboards and sang.
(32:38):
Charlie Musselwhite was on harmonica.
Can't remember than a guy's namewho's playing guitar.
And I think Geldofsort of wandered it out,
playing the bow roleor some weird shit, but, But
Liam, Amalia, the headphones didn't workand we were going live to hear.
So he played the
keyboards, he couldn't hear the keyboard,and he sang.
(32:59):
Oh, wow.
But he played the keyboard.
Didn't miss a notewithout even hearing it. Yes.
That's somebody that was amazing, Mr.
Beethoven. Some of those guys.
Yeah.
I mean, my letI have one last latency story too,
because it ties into radio againwhen I did the Eagles football,
broadcasts, we were simulcastingbecause it was television,
(33:19):
but we were on the radio. Right.
And it's not technically a simulcast,but the fans in Philly
and in the Philadelphia areawanted to hear our announcer, you know.
Yeah, they want to hear the hometownannouncer. Right.
So it's very popular to turn downthe television and turn up the radio.
Right. Talk about sync problems.
What often happened waswe were ahead of the broadcast.
(33:43):
Yeah. Right, right.
And so you would get calls from the fanscalling in the station saying.
You guys are ahead of the TV, man.
And then we'd have to call into engineering.
And they had a delay control,you know, back at the.
Yeah, at the stationthey'd add a second 2 or 3 of delay
so that when you lose to the gamebecause you see when you hear male go,
(34:04):
it's just, you know, fumbleand the guy's still running
and they're like, it'sgoing to be a fumble. Oh shit.
Oh you bet. Yeah.
Yeah.
So you would have to deal with that,you know. And that.
Well if. You watch it.
If you watch film coverage,you'll see that all the time
because they'll, they'll cross thelike this the garage of whatever team.
And you see a screen in the background
(34:26):
which is showing somethingyou saw about four seconds ago.
And then it will turn to the guys in the,you know, in the in the garage
on the pit lane, two. More placeswhere latency comes up.
Number one, you buy these in houselike Sony's speakers,
and they are having to synchronizethe delay
throughout your houseso that you walk upstairs and downstairs
(34:47):
and you get somewhatof a continuous experience
without getting an echoey soundwhen you're standing between two zones.
That's one.
And that's very hard to do,especially because you're dealing
with physical space.
At some pointyou cannot actually compensate for this.
You can.
Only one thing to be really clear about.
(35:07):
You can only compensate for latency.
From a point of perspective, and you canonly compensate latency by adding latency.
There's no time travel like people havelatency compensation like. You.
Can't speed it up to.
Time travel yet.
Yeah. You can't you can't go back in time.
So that's one place.
The other thingthat's interesting with latency,
(35:28):
you might remember with landline
phone calls, they were quicker.
And now everyone is so used to latency
on the phone network with cell phonesthat the funniest thing
that I've realized, actually,is that recently I've been on a few phone
calls and Source Connectbeat the phone call.
(35:49):
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
Which was really interesting.
Well, everyonenow is this culturally used to much higher
latency conversationsthan we used to in the 80s with
wired telephones across the whole world.
Except when you were doing.The you're going. Through these.
I can still remember though, back inthe 70s and 80s, because I'm fucking old.
(36:12):
You know,you be doing an international call.
It'd be like, how are you?
Are you there? Yeah. Good.
Oh, no. I'm sorry.
And then everyone's talking over
one another and it's costingloads of money and.
Yeah, yeah.
God, Jesus.It's like a phone call. Oh, yeah.
I a half hour interviewat a radio station.
It cost the station,like 200 bucks or something. Yeah, yeah.
I see end lines go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(36:33):
Fucking. Oh yeah yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
God forbid someone forgot to hang upthe damn ISDN box.
Over the weekend, we we did thatwhen we were just, testing Source Connect,
and we were doing some latency testsbecause aptX for example, is a codec.
We were talking about compressionand decompression, and we used to have
a version of Source Connect that usethe aptX codec or people call it aptX X.
(36:56):
And now aptX is used a lot with Bluetoothfor doing your surround speakers
because it's it most codecs.
A codec is the thing that compressesthe data and makes it less data
to transmit.
Most codecs do thisby figuring out what you can't hear.
Is a human. But aptX didn't use,
perceptual coding.
(37:17):
It used, linear adaptive linear
PCM or something I think had ad, I forget.
But anyways, it was much, much faster.
What would take most codecs around20 milliseconds to encode decode?
I think aptX could do itin four milliseconds. Wow.
So we were testing with the aptX ISDN boxand comparing it to Source Connect.
(37:38):
Connect it to California.
We had some pretty good results
and then we just went homeand it was the weekend.
Yeah.
And the aptX system would takeit wouldn't take two ISDN lines.
It would take four because it it couldn'tachieve as much of a compression ratio.
It was much faster.
Who didn't disconnect?
Robert I'm. Innocent.
(38:01):
The box didn't disconnect.
The the line, the,
Oops.
That was an expensive,that was got to hang.
That was expensive.
That was that was almost $1,000 for thatone weekend.
Yeah.
Yeah, it happened to Miguel for our IP.
They left it open.
Yeah, yeah, nobody hung up.
(38:21):
The suit didn't hang up. Yeah.
And he he was the one that dialed in. Oh.
Which is not really protocol,but for whatever reason.
Boom. He dialed in. And got he got nailed.
He got the bill. Yeah. And he. Yeah.
My my, when when.
When I first set up the bridge,I bought a, used my, ISDN box,
and it came from some radio station.
It was set up as a studio,the transmitter link.
(38:43):
And it had a program in there that said,if you disconnect,
like dial backand get that connection back.
And I didn't know that,I didn't clear the settings out.
And I put my new ISDN numbers in there,and I did a bridge that dialed out.
And then like bridges overand I disconnected or whatever.
And I got home and that was like 300 bucksand that was just for like eight hours
(39:06):
or something or six hoursthat the stupid thing dialed back.
The moral to the story is, if you've gotan ISDN box and you forget to hang up,
you need to go to a CVS store right nowbecause you're going to need it.
And that's the out
literally.
Well, that's the that's is at the end.
(39:30):
Both.
Well that was fun.
Is it a works.
In the pro audio suite thanks to
tribal and Austrian audiorecorded using Source Connect,
edited by Andrew Peters and mix by RobertGood.
Your own audio issues,just ask Rob Aucoin.
(39:51):
Tech support for George the Tech William.
Don't forget to subscribe
to the show and join in the conversationon our Facebook group to leave a comment,
suggest a topic or just say goodbye,drop us a note at our website.
Rodeo swedish.com.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2
Season Two Out Now! Law & Order: Criminal Justice System tells the real stories behind the landmark cases that have shaped how the most dangerous and influential criminals in America are prosecuted. In its second season, the series tackles the threat of terrorism in the United States. From the rise of extremist political groups in the 60s to domestic lone wolves in the modern day, we explore how organizations like the FBI and Joint Terrorism Take Force have evolved to fight back against a multitude of terrorist threats.