Best USB audio interface for low-latency monitoring?

daverd

New member
Hi there, thanks in advance for your advice.

My friend and I get together and jam every week, and we've been noticing unacceptable latency on my current setup. We each have a MIDI keyboard hooked into my laptop, playing software synths in my DAW. I've been using ASIO4ALL drivers, which are better than the default Windows drivers for sure, but I feel like I could still do better. I have a Fiio USB audio interface which unfortunately does not provide its own 64-bit ASIO drivers.

What would you recommend for an audio interface to minimize latency? To be clear, I will not be recording any live instruments such as guitar or vocals, I only need audio output -- something that can plug into USB on my laptop and get sound out to speakers as quickly as possible. Ideally the price tag would be under $200. Audio quality isn't a concern -- obviously I don't want it to sound like crap but I suspect that any interface in that price range will be just fine for our needs.

Is it advantageous to have an audio interface with MIDI in? Currently I have my keyboards plugged into a separate USB slot on my laptop using an adapter, and I have no reason to believe that's causing any excess latency.

Thanks,
Dave
 
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