A third post in the networked music performance series. Technical latency is solved. Institutional infrastructure has a name. What students actually learn — and what conservatoire curricula consistently get wrong about teaching it — turns out to be a different problem entirely.
A follow-up to the August 2023 latency post. The numbers were fine. The hard part turned out to be everything else: governance, maintenance, invisible labour, and why most Digital Music Labs quietly die after the grant ends.
We measured end-to-end audio and video latency for LoLa and MVTP across six European research-network links. One-way audio latency ranged from 7.5 to 22.5 ms. Routing topology mattered more than geographic distance. Enterprise firewalls were a disaster. Here is what we found.