Measuring the Audio Latency

Comments

• fladd

  April 2022

  Hi there,

  
  

  unfortunately you cannot measure this purely with software (as there is no way for software to know when the actual sound was played).

  For our tests, we hence used a hardware oscilloscope to measure audio latency. The exact model I cannot remember right now, but should be mentioned in our 2014 article (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-013-0390-6). Basically, the audio output of the computer was connected to the oscilloscope and in addition we sent a marker to the oscilloscope via a serial port.

  With "latency" we mean the difference between the sent marker and the audio. That is, the difference between us telling the soundcard to produce a sound, and the sound actually arriving at the audio output of the computer.

  Some people also have good experiences using a BlackBox toolkit (see for instance this recent thread: https://forum.cogsci.nl/discussion/7945/timing-of-expyriment-it-is-pretty-good).

  
  

  I hope this helped. Let me know if you have more questions.

  
  

  Best,

  Florian

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• anapinho

  April 2022

  Hello Florian,

  Thank you very much for your feedback and references. I am going to try to assess the timing accuracy of my audio events with an oscilloscope as described in the paper. Nevertheless, I didn't understand what type of marker you sent to the oscilloscope. Could you clarify that?

  Thank you very much once again.

  Best,

  Ana Luísa