Audio Latency Budget Calculator — Round-Trip Delay

Most musicians can work comfortably with round-trip latency under 10-12ms. Below 6ms is considered unnoticeable. Above 20ms becomes distracting for most performers, especially drummers and keyboard players.

Smaller buffer sizes mean lower latency but higher CPU load (and risk of audio glitches). A buffer of 128 samples at 48kHz gives about 2.7ms one-way latency. Doubling the buffer doubles the latency but halves the CPU stress.

A/D (analogue-to-digital) and D/A (digital-to-analogue) converters introduce a small fixed delay, typically 0.5-2ms each. This is hardware-dependent and cannot be changed in software. Check your interface specifications.

The distance figure shows how far sound would travel in the time of your total latency. For example, 10ms of latency is equivalent to standing 3.4 metres from your monitor speakers. This helps visualise the delay intuitively.