Christian Luther

Founder

Playfair Audio

About Me

Christian is the founder of Playfair Audio and a seasoned audio software developer from Hannover, Germany. With a background in electrical engineering and years of experience at companies like Kemper Amps and Sennheiser, he’s spent his career building tools that make audio production more intuitive. Through Playfair Audio, he focuses on solving the technical challenges so others can focus on being creative.

Sessions

  • Mind the Spike: Benchmarking for Worst-Case Execution Time in Realtime Code
    16:40 - 17:00 UTC | Monday 10th November 2025 | Bristol 2
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    What’s the longest your audio callback will ever take? On modern CPUs, execution time is anything but consistent. Cache misses, pipeline stalls, thread contention, and OS jitter introduce variability—and occasionally, catastrophic outliers. These rare spikes are exactly what can break realtime audio, yet they’re nearly impossible to capture with conventional benchmarking. After all, how do you know the longest time you saw… really was the longest? This talk introduces Extreme Value Theory (EVT) as a practical framework for analyzing the worst-case execution time of realtime-critical code. We’ll look at how to apply EVT to benchmark data, how to interpret the […]

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