InitializePsychSound([reallyneedlowlatency=0])

This routine loads the PsychPortAudio sound driver for high-precision, low-latency, multi-channel sound playback and recording.

Call it at the beginning of your experiment script, optionally providing the ‘reallyneedlowlatency’ flag set to one to push really hard for low latency.

On MacOS/X and GNU/Linux, the PsychPortAudio driver will just work with the lowest possible latency and highest timing precision after this initialization.

On Microsoft Windows, things are more complicated and painful as always:

PsychPortAudio on Windows supports three different Windows sound systems, MME, DirectSound and ASIO. Only ASIO is suitable for research grade auditory stimulation with support for multi-channel sound cards and for high-precision and low-latency sound timing and time-stamping. If you want reliable timing and time-stamping with latencies and accuracy better than 500 msecs, you *must* have a decent ASIO sound card with proper vendor supplied ASIO drivers installed in your computer. A regular card, for example built-in sound chips of your computer, will not suffice and we will not guarantee any reasonable timing precision at all!

The Windows MME (MultiMediaExtensions) sound system has typical latencies and inaccuracies in excess of 500 msecs, and the slightly better DirectSound sound system still has a typical latency of over 30 milliseconds. Both systems are known to be buggy and unreliable wrt. timing on many systems.

The ASIO sound system provided by professional class sound cards usually has excellent timing precision and latencies below 15 msecs, often as low as 5 msecs for pro hardware. If you need really low latency or high precision sound on Windows, ASIO is what you must use: Some (usually more expensive) professional class sound cards ship with ASIO enabled sound drivers, or at least there’s such a driver available from the support area of the website of your sound card vendor.

Disclaimer: “ASIO is a trademark and software of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.”

For cards without native ASIO drivers, there’s the free ASIO4ALL driver, downloadable from http://asio4all.com, which may or may not work well on your specific sound card - The driver emulates the ASIO interface on top of the WDM-KS (Windows Driver Model Kernel Streaming) API from Microsoft, so the quality depends on the underlying WDM driver. For research grade use, please do yourself a favor and invest in a real ASIO card.

If you manage to get such an ASIO enabled sound driver working on your sound hardware, and your ASIO enabled driver and sound card are of sufficiently high quality, you can enjoy latencies as low as 5 msecs and a sound onset accuracy with a standard deviation from the mean of less than 0.1 milliseconds on MS-Windows - We measured around 20 microseconds on some setups, e.g., the M-Audio Delta 1010-LT soundcard under Windows-XP SP2.

Using OS/X or Linux will usually get you comparably good or better results with most standard sound hardware, due to the technically superior sound systems of these operating systems.