Linux's USB Audio Driver Aims For Latency Reduction

[edwaleni]

Creative SB1290 USB Audio - works fine.
Allen & Heath ZED8i - USB DAC interface works great
Various BT earbuds and headphones with BT 4.0 and BT 5.0 USB adapters. Not so great.

[puleglot]

And I forgot to mention that almost all professional audio interfaces are UAC compliant these days.

[puleglot]

Standard USB Audio class works, but do the professional sound interfaces? Eg. Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 mk3?

Yes, they do. But since 18i20 mk3 uses implicit feedback, you need a recent kernel version. At least 5.11 if I'm not mistaken.

[caligula]

For USB audio: Excellent. Be it the cheap 7.1 card or the professional DJ controller; PulseAudio or JACK, it works. All 8 channels, LEDs, input/output (both microphone, line and S/PDIF) and even the buttons work. And it goes down to ~2ms latency (sometimes lower than my HDA!).
For wireless audio: I have never tried, as I do not own any wireless audio devices. Lossy codecs and higher latency irk me (heck, several companies claim to have achieved 60ms over Bluetooth, but that's nothing when compared to 5ms (or less) over cable).

Standard USB Audio class works, but do the professional sound interfaces? Eg. Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 mk3?

[Schugy]

Focus on latency is good and with any clean up I hope for more or maintained robustness. E.g. use two USB sound cards, use an USB soundcard for playback and a webcam with a video stream and a sound capture stream and pull either one while in use.

[tildearrow]

How's your Linux USB and wireless audio support been working out these days with recent devices and different desktops / audio back-ends? The situation is certainly much improved from in the past, but let us know in the forums if you are still encountering any Linux audio oddities.

For USB audio: Excellent. Be it the cheap 7.1 card or the professional DJ controller; PulseAudio or JACK, it works. All 8 channels, LEDs, input/output (both microphone, line and S/PDIF) and even the buttons work. And it goes down to ~2ms latency (sometimes lower than my HDA!).
For wireless audio: I have never tried, as I do not own any wireless audio devices. Lossy codecs and higher latency irk me (heck, several companies claim to have achieved 60ms over Bluetooth, but that's nothing when compared to 5ms (or less) over cable).

[tildearrow]

Okay... but why would you use JACK on such hardware?

Lower latency. The last time I tried (in 2015) on a laptop with CA0132 the card enforced a buffer size of 1024 or higher (anything else causes overruns).

[obri]

I use a Soundblaster X G5 on USB. The volume and correct input is not remembered by the system.
So I wrote a little python script to do this for me.

[jntesteves]

How come?!
Try using JACK on it. It will be impossible.

Okay... but why would you use JACK on such hardware?

[tildearrow]

I am using a Soundblaster Zx (CA0132), which is fully working, including all the proprietary DSP features and 5.1 surround and occasionally an AptX enabled Bluetooth headset. I've had zero issues so far. Gentoo amd64, Pulseaudio 13.0, Kernel 5.12 series

How come?!
Try using JACK on it. It will be impossible.