Making the jump from realtone cable to a 'proper' interface

[Poopfeels]

I'm assuming a lot of people that started with rocksmith ended up using their cables for ampsims like amplitube, bias etc. This is where I am now.

 

I'm fairly satisfied, I dont get any perceivable lag and the sound quality is great, but I'm wondering if its a case of 'i dont know what im missing out on'

 

 

 

If I bought a device like the UR22MKII which is my current top contender, am I likely to see a noticeable difference that would justify the cost? I'm already using relatively high end headphones.

 

 

 

The only thing that really bothers me is this faint background hum that is present on basically everything I do when I push the volume, but I cant tell if thats just normal or caused by my current setup.

[Alex360]

@@Poopfeels, I'm not that guy with lot's for experience in this topic, but RT cable have lowest noise floor at -90 to -115 dBu so it kinda dirty at -90 rank, it also should be like 40 ms delay in real world which is slightly noticeable (in best scenario, worst cases is like more than 300 ms which could be at low sample rate and all)

you probably wanna go up and play with real amp+cab (combo amplifiers is kinda good, look for vids on youtube, like Rob Chapman, who did amp's overview and all the guitar stuff to sell) which has almost no delay and sounds much cleaner than any DAC you may find on usb bases, maybe PCI sound cards would go up a bit, but still no good as real amp, IMO

 

Call some more folks to see if it's true, like @@firekorn, who should be much more experienced than me in this question..

[firekorn]

@@Alex360 i'm curious how you gathered those information especially since you seem to confuse many things together, for exemple the RT cable in itself doesn't add 40ms that would be probably the worst ADC ever made available but this delay more likely include the audio processing and the DAC making the RT cable way better than what you suggest.

 

Also you can find more and more combo that include a DSP and do an conversion of the signal to apply some effect. The issue is that you are saying combo are always processing the analog signal which isn't true. Though that's right that a full analog path will always have less delay than a path where you have to convert the signal.

 

So some audio interface can have lower latency than an amp.

 

For all i've seen and tested so far, the RTC is far from a bad ADC but hey that's not much of an answer so let's investigate a bit further.

 

@@Poopfeels you have to understand one important thing here, Rocksmith isn't exactly designed to support any other interface and you are more likely to get more trouble by trying another hardware for the input instead of the RTC which is likely isn't worth any actual gain of quality (if such a thing exist in that specific cases).

 

But convenience is one thing, let's talk about numbers. Rocksmith will always use your interface at 16 bit and 48kHz. Your interface can be way better, it doesn't matter so the 24 bit and 192kHz from the UR22 is useless in Rocksmith case you won't get any kind of magical improvement there.

 

Then there's the pre-amp and the quality of the hi-z input that can alter the sound, in RTC cases, it has been specifically designed to work for guitar and bass so that it will give the best possible signal to be analyzed by Rocksmith while i have strictly no idea how the pre-amp has been designed in the UR22 nor can i say if the hi-Z input is actually properly made. Let's imagine that both are good (and that's a big if as i doubt any 130$ interface have decent pre-amp while the RTC don't actually have a variable pre-amp) then you are stuck with unnoticeable difference at best and at worst something very similar.

 

but hey let's not be sad about it, it might actually bring you one interesting thing, a decent DAC for headphones and monitors but that's by considering you have excellent monitors or headphone which i doubt is the case so you won't notice the difference...

 

Ok let's kill the idea even more, only the input 2 has a hi-z input and so far i don't think anyone was able to use something other than the input 1 in such interface with Rocksmith successfully.

 

So unless you intend to use that interface for something else that RS, don't buy it.

[Jefbyos]

I agree the conclusion.

 

Decent USB interfaces (most common around) will bring you far better dynamic, less noise and reduced latency with software who will use ASIO drivers. In a nutshell, with amplitube, bias (which you mentioned using)... not with RS internal sounds.

[Jefbyos]

Ok let's kill the idea even more, only the input 2 has a hi-z input and so far i don't think anyone was able to use something other than the input 1 in such interface with Rocksmith successfully.

 

That is something that can be easily solved using O Deus Asio link ;)

[Jefbyos]

Ok let's kill the idea even more, only the input 2 has a hi-z input and so far i don't think anyone was able to use something other than the input 1 in such interface with Rocksmith successfully.

 

Routing issues are something that can be easily solved using O Deus Asio link ;)

[Alex360]

@@firekorn, hey, there's was theory thay if you minimize windows timer it should decrease delay thing but it will waste more ticks and burn power faster, could you try if anything changes to you if you power your PC up and try to play RS from that state and then open up this prog (https://github.com/tebjan/TimerTool) for example and set lowest possible timer value and launch game again or just switch back and see if it does any good to sound delay at all? because I can't really say if it's good way or not, since chrome sets delay to 1 ms when it launches tho...