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Games don't have particularly large buffers. There's just a very long pipeline with lots of buffering. It's honestly pretty bad. But almost no one measures and it doesn't actually matter to players.

Musicians have keenly trained ears. I would imagine their much more sensitive to audio latency than even a pro gamer, nevermind average Joe off the street.

Where latency really matters is when you have a musical instrument that plays a sound and it's connected to a monitor. If those sounds are separated by more than 8ms or so the difference will be super noticeable to anyone, including Joe off the street.

I'd be interested for someone to run a user study on MIDI keyboard latency. I'd bet $3.50 that anything under 40 milliseconds would be sufficient. Maybe 30 milliseconds. I'd be utterly shocked if it needed to be 8 milliseconds. And I'd be extremely shocked if every popular MIDI keyboard on the market actually hit that level of latency.



MIDI -> audio latency is mostly a function of the MIDI receiver, not the MIDI sender. So the MIDI keyboard is not where the latency comes from (typically).




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