HI HN, long time reader - first post I felt super compelled to respond to.
This is a massive bugaboo in the audio industry in my opinion.
I have always been a PCI soundcard user - and still am to this day, but industry trends are stopping this. I think a big part of this is due to laptops/ipads and the like becoming more popular devices, as well as from a useability standpoint - companies optimise for succesful adoption into a users system - than technical specifications.
I started my DAW with a Terratec soundcard with midi + stereo audio ins and outs roughly 20 years ago.
Fastforward 7 years - i bought an early USB interface - the NI Audio Kontrol 1 to use with a laptop. I could run everything on it - take it out and about - cool!!
Fastworward another few years - and i got more serious about audio and bought a Lynx PCIe AES card (now without midi) - to use with an Apogee Rosetta 800 (8 in / 8 out). Now we're getting there. But - not an all in one solution.
In 2022 - surprisingly - the only (?) companies doing full PCIe audio solutions are Lynx and RME. In a fresh session in FL Studio or Ableton - with a sample buffer rate of 64 (the lowest) i enjoy latency of 0.72m/s. This cant be beaten by USB. However - that's not a deal breaker for most people sadly.
It greatly saddens me that audio in general is a second class citizen with regards to tech advancement. It still blows my mind that the Atari STE with MIDI in built onto its circuit still thwarts the tightness in the midi department - of a brand new full specced blazing machine. We need more development for Realtime O/S in the midi world.
0.72m/s? I hope you mean 0.72 milliseconds, which sounds about right for 44.1khz and 64 samples.
Anyway, have you actually measured the _true_ latency from when your computer thinks it's sending out a signal and when it comes out of the speakers, and comparing it between a (good) USB interface and your preferred PCIe solution? After all, I have an old Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 gen1 and I too can technically crank the buffer size down to 64 in FL Studio and post about it on the internet...
i cant get 0.72ms from my laptop for example. and havent tested it in any official way - i cannot/have not ever got this type of performance on any other solutions before this.
ive not tried thunderbolt before - indeed may be a good stand in for PCI as the comments mention below
I did my math again, and a latency (buffer size in milliseconds) of 0.72ms (0.072 s) with a buffer size of 64 samples means your sampling rate would have to be about 400 KHz (stereo). Are you sure it's not 7.2 milliseconds (to bring it to the usual range of 40 KHz sampling rate)?
I moved over to Thunderbolt plus Audio over Ethernet. This is where the growth is (Dante etc) in the high end. I think I have 60 channels of IO and thinking of adding another 40.
USB is good enough for a lot of people, though I am not a fan so that covers the average prosumer.
MIDI is a totally different subject, but I can run MIDI clock from audio which is as tight as it gets these days. See USAMO from Expert Sleepers.
USAMO doesnt help with something like finger drumming/keys - i wish there was a reversed version of it, i believe it was talked about at some point - converting output into audio - decoded in the pc - for tighter timing.
Thunderbolt is the way, truth and light - with m1. I have a presonus quantum 2626 connected to my Mac m1pro over thunderbolt and can work at 32 sample buffer size in ableton.
This is a massive bugaboo in the audio industry in my opinion.
I have always been a PCI soundcard user - and still am to this day, but industry trends are stopping this. I think a big part of this is due to laptops/ipads and the like becoming more popular devices, as well as from a useability standpoint - companies optimise for succesful adoption into a users system - than technical specifications.
I started my DAW with a Terratec soundcard with midi + stereo audio ins and outs roughly 20 years ago.
Fastforward 7 years - i bought an early USB interface - the NI Audio Kontrol 1 to use with a laptop. I could run everything on it - take it out and about - cool!!
Fastworward another few years - and i got more serious about audio and bought a Lynx PCIe AES card (now without midi) - to use with an Apogee Rosetta 800 (8 in / 8 out). Now we're getting there. But - not an all in one solution.
In 2022 - surprisingly - the only (?) companies doing full PCIe audio solutions are Lynx and RME. In a fresh session in FL Studio or Ableton - with a sample buffer rate of 64 (the lowest) i enjoy latency of 0.72m/s. This cant be beaten by USB. However - that's not a deal breaker for most people sadly.
It greatly saddens me that audio in general is a second class citizen with regards to tech advancement. It still blows my mind that the Atari STE with MIDI in built onto its circuit still thwarts the tightness in the midi department - of a brand new full specced blazing machine. We need more development for Realtime O/S in the midi world.