MIDI lag

Hey guys,

I wrote about this to the Elektron support but no answer in a week, so I am asking here as well. My original question:

Hello!

A friend of mine and me have a new techno project together and we have some weird problems with the MIDI sync of the MachieDrum SPS-1 UW+. It always seems to be out of sync.

We use the MD as MIDI master and send it’s MIDI clock into the KOMA Elektronik RH301 to let it convert to DINsync and analog clocks. When I look at the output of the MD (in our example a hihat sample) and the analog clock that was generated from the MD MIDI clock on an oscilloscope, the MD is between 17 and 22ms(!) behind its own MIDI clock. That means the sample is played after the MIDI clock event is sent.

If we make the same test with MIDI Note Ons (programmed into one of the 16 instrument slots) it is much tighter though (I think the delay here was around 4ms). We assume that the MIDI clock event /message is sent at the beginning of the step and the Note On probably later.

This seemed quite unbelievable so we double checked everything but we came to the same result. The times differ a bit from synth to synth. We mainly used hihat samples for our test.

Can you tell me what’s going on here?

Thanks and best regards,
Christian

Thanks for any advice!!

Haven’t heard of the exact thing you mention but I can agree that the MD’s clock is a little on the fuzzy side. Octatrack’s is much more accurate.