I tested some gear I own for internal tempo stability and midi clock stability, because I want to ensure that I have the best performance possible when setting up for things like sampling, or when wanting to jam with a few machines.
So I decided to do a very basic test for now just to get some ballpark ideas of what gear performs the best, and which does not do so well.
Obviously I knew the Elektron gear would perform well above average, so not much surprise there, but I did find some of the others fairly eye opening.
None of this matters if you can’t hear the timing discrepancies, I think around 2ms is generally accepted as the threshold at which things become noticeable, probably a bit lower when two or more devices are synced, which can be noticed as smearing/flamming.
I tested with internal clock and synced to a Roland SBX-1 which is a pretty solid master clock. I put a lookup table to easily convert from samples to milliseconds for convenience.
I will do some other tests with different combinations of master, but I think the SBX gives out the most accurate clock over midi of the gear I have, but it will be interesting to see how others stack up.
For the recording and markers I used wavosaur, it has a function where precise markers can be placed according to bpm/beat and is free.
Anyway, here is a spreadsheet I made showing the performance of some of my gear, for all devices tempo was at 120BPM and 8 beats were analysed, the first beat is always 0 because I trimmed right at start, I then placed markers at every beat (1/4 notes) and had each device playing 1/4 note. I then checked where the sound appeared VS where the marker was, a negative value indicates early, positive value is late.
Gear tested:
Roland SBX-1, MC-707, Akai MPC One, Synthstrom Deluge, Squarp Pyramid, Elektron OT mk2, ARmk2.
If anyone is interested to post their own feel free, it could be handy to have a database.