Hello,
I would like to give the results of some tests that I made with members of one of the orchestras that I conduct and my personal conclusions.
Sagora:
It is probably the one with the best user interface and usability. The mixer is something that we really liked, where you can add your name and instrument to your profile, which is quite handy when looking at the mixer to know who’s talking, for example. Before that, you make your own room with a password and the other members join. For this test I was able to use the ordinary sound card and microphone of my computer (no special hardware), such as the rest of the group. I find it strange that the mixer comes with full volume also for yourself. If for some reason you’re not using headphones (say, cause you’re still looking for them), it will create a bad feedback. I would certainly prefer it to come muted for listening to yourself by default. To listen oneself with latency is confusing to play an instrument and to speak!
The internal configuration is very conservative, but after enabling „small network buffers“ and dragging both Buffers to 10 (Local and Server, disabling the „auto“ mode), with a Buffer delay of 5,33ms it was possible to achieve 50ms overall latency. The sound quality is good but the latency is, for musical purposes, a bit noticeable. We’ll keep testing it in the future.
Sirius:
Unusable for an ensemble as of now. Since it has video, I tried conducting having in mind that it was gonna be a bit delayed (not uncommon in German orchestras anyways!). But we weren’t able to synchronize at all. There are also no settings to configure that would improve the latency. I however would strongly recommend Sirius for music lessons (say, piano lessons). The video works fine and the sound quality is certainly way better than Zoom or Skype with low latency. Heck, I think I would even recommend Sirius for a normal chat! The fact that more than one person can speak at the same time + its sound quality makes it a great improvement over Zoom or Skype also for general use. It’s a great thing that it gives you a direct link to your room (I think it’s called „session“ in Sirius). People only have to open that link and only one person has to be properly registered on the platform, which makes it very practical for others to join.
Soundjack:
Probably the best of the three in regard to latency, with the drawback that I at least had to use a „special“ sound card and microphone (in this case a Tascam recorder, my internal sound card and microphone are not supported by Soundjack). It requires more configuration than the other two options, and you have to run in the end three different things: Jack/Asio4All, Soundjack (desktop app.) and the Web-browser, which makes it overall a bit unwieldy to use. If everyone knows what they’re doing and don’t care about the extra effort/hardware, this is probably the best option. Our overall latency was between 15-30ms, which is quite usable for ensemble rehearsal, but since very few members of the orchestra are tech-savvy, we haven’t been able to test it for a proper music rehearsal.
—Martín.