There are a lot of choices for audio hardware depending on your
preferences, but one thing is absolutely required: an ASIO device
driver. You don't usually get an ASIO driver with built-in audio
hardware which is probably why you had high latency.
On a modern machine you should be able to run smoothly with a 128
sample block size. There will be one of these on both the input and
output sides for a "round trip" latency of 256 samples or 5.805
milliseconds at a sample rate of 44.1K.
The general belief is that latency below 10 milliseconds becomes very
difficult to notice as long as it stays fixed. Even if you do notice,
it is usually possible to adjust your playing style to compensate just
like you do when you play with a monitor speaker more than 6 feet
away. Accoustic players may be more sensitive to this.
The actual ASIO block size you can use is dependent on many things:
the speed of the CPU, the amount of memory, the applications you have
running at the same time, the firewire chipset (if you use a firewire
audio interface) the graphics card memory, etc. If the block size is too
small the system won't be able to keep up with requests from the
hardware and you will year "clicks".
The important thing to understand is that latency isn't some fixed
quality of Ableton or the audio hardware, it is something you tune to
be as low as possible for your combination of hardware and software.
It's sort of like finding the highest stable operating speed of a car.
If you've got a machine less than 2 years old with carefully selected
components and you've been careful about what software you have
installed then a 128 block size is to be expected, and I've
seen some go as low at 64. I've never heard of 32 under Windows
or Mac.
If you've got a 5 year old machine with under 1GB of memory and a
lot of software installed then you might have problems getting that
without a lot of tuning if you can get it at all.
Jeff
I've been thinking about making this same shift myself (from Repeater + Ableton-as-non-recording-loop-player to Ableton-as-live-recording-looper). On a standard laptop sound setup w/o special audio hardware (just as a test bed) the latency was too long for my taste. My old desktop rig has an old Echo Gina card / break-out box, but is ancient hardware (PIII, believe it or not); haven't tried it there yet. I'm planning on upgrading this machine though.
What are most Windows folks using for the audio hardware these days, and what should be typical good/expected latency times w/Ableton?