Axiom 25 USB and lag

Im looking into something like Kontakt, to load up Piano instruments and Strings, Guitars, etc. and use a MIDI Keyboard to play these from Kontakt.

IF I bought the M-Audio Axiom 25 Keyboard and used its USB function, how much lag would there be from the time I hit the keys to the time I heard the note?

Because right now, im using my regular qwerty PC keyboard and when i hit, for instance "B" to play a note inside Kontakt, there is a very noticeable delay and there's no way I could play/record a song with this amount of delay.

How would buying a USB MIDI Keyboard be any different?

Don't know how quickly Kontact responds to qwerty keypress, but I am not sure a USB MIDI keyboard would improve that.

I would expect that a keypress on the computer keyboard should trigger a Kontact sample immediately, without any lag at all, more likely the lag is on the output of Kontact, between producing the sound inside Kontact and outputting it, not between the keypress and Kontact.

Probably more important, in terms of latency (lag), to look at reducing your computer audio interface buffer settings as low as possible, to reduce the latency. You generally lower the buffer size until you start hearing clicks/pops/etc. in the audio output, then go back up a setting or two.

Depending on what you are using for an audio interface at the moment, for example, the built-in computer motherboard audio output, you might not be able to go as low in buffer size as a good external audio interface.

Latency is always a tradeoff against processing power in a native processing system, lower latency requires more computer processing power, but running plugins also requires more processing power.

You need external sound card with ASIO drivers if PC, depend on ports can be connected thru USB, FireWire, PCMCIA / ExpressCard (rare). If you're on PC for a starter you might install ASIO4ALL driver which will give you lower latency. Just keyboard won't change a thing, will be the same as QWERTY keys.

Bugfix wrote:You need external sound card with ASIO drivers if PC, depend on ports can be connected thru USB, FireWire, PCMCIA / ExpressCard (rare). If you're on PC for a starter you might install ASIO4ALL driver which will give you lower latency. Just keyboard won't change a thing, will be the same as QWERTY keys.

Yes. And the ASIO4All emulated driver can get you very good performance improvements even on the lowliest of PC's.