First post from me on this excellent Forum...

I've been researching my best digital set up for classical piano for a quite a time.. After much deliberation have now ordered a Kawai MP8 and intend to use this with Synthogy's Ivory running on a new desktop PC which will meet the recommended hardware requirements from Synthogy.

I have two concerns..

1) what is the optimal soundcard to use? I am reasonably OK with PCs but find the variety of soundcards available confusing

2) will I have any problems with latency? I'm rather worried about this and I'd like to do everything up front to prevent getting problems. Or am I worrying unnecessarily?

I'll be using headphones or using my audio system through the line out. Speakers are situated under the keyboard. I may need to upgrade this side of things later on to do justice to the set-up obviously.

Appreciate any help or advice.

You are spending a lot of money buying an MP8, Ivory and a new PC, that I see no reason to skimp on a good sound card. A good sound card will get you great sound quality as well as low latency. Note that latency is a function of the CPU as well, but I'll assume your new PC has the horse power.

There are so many good sound cards out there, so let me just recommend two. IMO, the best ones out there are made by RME . The HDSP 9632 is more than enough. However, you will need an ADAT break-out box. Another option is an Echo Audio Gina 3G . I have not tried this generation of the Gina, but had the first generation years ago and it was excellent. Its more convenient than the RME as it comes with a break-out box including MIDI and headphone output.

Spend the extra 300 or so an a good sound card, you will not regret it.

1) As you noted, there are a variety of soundcards/interfaces available. At the lower end of the prosumer options is the M-Audio 2496 or M-Audio 192, and moving up you have options from RME, ECHO, Creamware, Motu, etc. These are generally PCI based solutions which have the benefit of being very fast (low latency) but obvisously disadvantaged at being tied to a single PC.

You also have the option of going for a Firewire or USB (not my first choice) interface if you plan to move from one host to another. Good options here include offerings from Alesis, Tascam, M-Audio, RME, Presonus, etc.

2) While the audio interface driver has some impact on latency, so does processor speed (faster is better), amount of memory (more is better), OS configuration (there are some great sites to help you configure Windows XP for audio applications), hard drive speed (the one where the samples will stream from, not the main drive for the OS) go for a SATA 74GB Raptor 10K RPM.

Rodney

From my experience, as far as latency is concerned, souncard is the key component. I'm running Ivory with my Casio, and have no latency issues, despite a pretty slow processor (2.4 GHz). I'm using M-Audio 192 (it's $130 on Amazon). The card inputs are extremely clean - you'll be able to hear perfect silence through your headphones when not playing anything.

For headphones, try Sennheiser's HD 580's or their new 600's. You'll hear the improvement mainly in the lower registers. Senns can take a couple of hours to burn in, so not to worry if they don't sound stunning right out of the box.

Many thanks for the very helpful recommendations and good leads. I've obviously got some more research to do here!