If your digital piano has USB MIDI, maybe an audio interface isn't going to help (I suppose decent ASIO drivers might be necessary and free ASIO4ALL is a decent place to start) I have no experience with USB MIDI.įor Piano VIs, the GS interface benchmarks FrÃ©dÃ©ric L referenced are probably the most useful. If you want top tier results using DIN MIDI cables, a computer with a somewhat fast/modern CPU & an audio interface with a decent 'performance rating' is more than enough.

I think it all matters but you don't need Pro-Studio grade gear for good results. TLDR: you don't need a special audio interface to get low latency, you need a somewhat beefy and more importantly well optimized rig to host your VST. I think you would need dedicated hardware w/o a big ass OS like windows running that does all kinds of things at any given moment that have nothing to do with audio to reliably get below 2ms. My sound card does not have a problem with that, my system cannot deliver that pop free though, so I stick to 2.7ms. It could get even lower if I had pianoteq pro and was able to set 192KHz. I can select 1.3ms equivalent buffer size on my soundcard. Most of your latency comes from the buffer you set and from any sort of postprocessing your audio interface does (ideally there should be none). IIRC Steinberg was the company that originally came up with ASIO, so I doubt the device itself will have problems with latency. Most latency issues occur because windows decides to do stuff. Latency issues do not happen at the audio interface stage but before that.

Free Steinberg VST Live Pro 1.3