Is the i7 a better choice for recording at low buffer sizes than Ryzen cos' it has better single core speed?

 

Depends on witch i7 you're talking about.
But, any i7 beats in all way any AMD

 

I don't know much about ryzen, but intel vs amd doesn't matter that much in music production afaik. I was doing just fine when I was using amd. Look for some test results. Prices usually changes country to country too. Buy one which best suits you.

 

in real life situations, you wont see any differences, as it is measured in ns, nano seconds, amd Ryzen, is a better choice, google, "Ryzen for audio recording" Most people recommend it if not all.

one thing i suggest is to buy the fastes ram you can afford!

 

Sorry, but AMD has higher latency and so on. There are benchmarks out there where Intel beats AMD almost every time.

Anyway, don't check for either. Wait for Coffee lake to come next month. 30% increase, 6 core and much better for music production. Guesses are it will be around €350 due AMD price tag.

 

Cpu has nothing do with latency. You can only compare Cpu overload per buffer size.

 

i7 has better single core performance and ryzen 1800x has better multicore performance. If DAW and plugins can use multiple cores without any limit, then ryzen is a beast.

 

watch this, its a first look. Showing Intel is still stronger but amd is the way to go - overall package and price !!! You wont see much a differnece only in price. I have an intel by the way. If i would have to buy new cpu now it would be an amd.

 

I'm using AMD right now, but not Ryzen. All of my research points to clock speed on a single core being the determinate factor of DAW performance. But that research was done at the time Ryzen was released. Perhaps more information has come to light.

 

My i7700k sits at 5,0Ghz at the moment, i doubt ryzen will beat it any time soon.

 

i record properly in 512 buffer size, i don't understand the people that want to record at lower buffer size levels, you must worry about to choose intel or amd for workflow but latency is just right at 512

 

Interesting vid...wonder how a 16 core threadripper will perform

 

Latency is a linear treatment. If you get more CPU power, you get less latency by using smaller buffers.
That's the reason why you use more buffers to reduce CPU load.

Now, problem is HOW your DAW and OS will treat recording
A good DAW will dispatch recording tracks on multiple cores the best way. So, multicore CPU power is best.
Because even if you record a single track...other cores are used by DAW, plugins and more.

 

Indeed. I don't know if it's just me, but I also don't hear any difference or improveness when I go even much lower than that. Actually wondering if there are more people here who experience the same or maybe there is just something wrong about me and I have to go to a doctor.

By the way this still might be an interesting article coming from Image Line.

https://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?ans=214

 

http://www.scanproaudio.info/2017/03/02/amd-ryzen-first-look-for-audio/
Scan pro wrote an article comparing the two. But ultimately it wasn't until you stacked tons of tracks and/or plugins that either would reach their limit. Amd reaches its limit faster at around 75-85% while Intel reached it limit around 90-98%. Technically the ryzen wasn't optimized properly for low buffer performance. But this was before the updates so couldn't say now. I run both Intel i5 and ryzen 1700x, ultimately I love ryzen way more. But that's because of the price per performance. And I was Intel fan boy until ryzen came to town. Planning my threadripper build soon so I'll be able to compare then. BTW I run ryzen at 32 buffer with around 1.0ms latency. But I'm also using a pcie card running to my adc/dac. Also to the other guys You won't notice a sound difference at higher buffer settings but if you're recording &/or using vstis then you will notice a difference in latency and tracks might not match up properly. Or you'll be a few ms off not a big difference but can make a world of difference if every track is a few ms off. Especially with drums.

 

I find it annoying that many people assume you want to do your DAW work at low latency or the lowest latency as possible,
when comparing intel vs Ryzen performance.
And furthermore : WHAT is low latency ?
Is it buffersize 128 or 64 or even lower ?
Or is buffersize 512 even considered as low latency ?
Most comments are vague about this imho.

My myself can totally live with buffersize 512 @ 44.1 khz. (assuming 512 is not really a low latency value).
I don't have to do low latency audio recording or even low latency midi recording ( i program midi for the most part).
So when people making statements about intel vs Ryzen, they should also state that if low latency is not important for you, AMD may come
out as a winner.
Just my 2 cents.

Warm Regards to everyone.

 

Just right for what, you didn't specify under what conditions you were refering?

 

Low Latency is technically how fast audio is either sent to DAW from (audio interface/adc inputs) or sent from DAW to audio interface/dac to speakers) which is technically round trip latency. Numerous things affect latency, interface and what type of connection its using (pcie which is fastest, thunderbolt, firewire, usb 1/2/3) due to its bandwidth constriction, CPU and how fast its core/cores are, RAM, buffer size, also whats running on your computer using its processes. Buffer size is basically the allotted time to process the signal and send it to the speakers which is also basically know as round trip latency, so with a high buffer size, you speak into the mic and you notice a visible delay before it comes out of your speakers, it has to process thru the computer and spit it back out, smaller buffer size is almost instantaneous. Usually you use small buffer size to record and use vstis, and higher one when mixing because it affects the performance of your computer. Typically you would want a buffer size of no more the 256 when recording &/or recording vstis. 512 might work for some people just depends on the rtl (round trip latency) anything more than 15ms (round trip) is a high latency techincally, after time the ms add up and puts the parts of your song off by just a hair. move two drums parts off by a few ms and notice the sound difference.

 

@vanhaze, agreed. For my part, latency isn't really a consideration. I work around latency problems when recording by using:
a.) stock sounds in the keyboard, record the part, then toy with VSTi's to get the sound I'm after.
b.) for guitar, using a hardware amp/effect for monitoring, record the DI and toy with either amp sims or reamping to get the sound I'm after.
c.) for vocals, use hardware effects (compression/reverb/delay, etc.) for monitoring, record the dry signal and add the effects I need afterwards.

Any time I've tried to use something that required low/no latency, my experience hasn't been great, and I'm able to work around it so I don't get involved with experimentation too much trying to reduce latency.
My concern is with the concurrent number/type of plugins I can run in a chain simultaneously without being frozen so that I can do gainstaging, and plugin adjustment to more than a single track at a time. I'm a heavy Nebula/Acqua user so the CPU horsepower is important to me.

 

For live perfomance, and smooth parameter control , low latency is best.
Regarding everyting else, besides live situations, latency isn't really that important imo.