No one cares if your pad sounds are a little late, but variable latency absolutely destroys drum grooves, sequenced electronica, and the kind of super-precise playing needed for good classical piano.
You might think most people can't hear the difference. And they can't. But - as with other audio production values - they can feel the difference. Tiny variations in timing are the bedrock of many kinds of musical expression. If they're not there, people notice.
1. If you strum the strings of a guitar and want your laptop to make you sound like Jimmy Hendrix, it had better output sound quickly enough that you perceive it happening "immediately." (I.e., it should sound and feel just like an electric guitar that's hooked up to an amp.)
2. Such a laptop like the one above had better make you sound like Jimmy Hendrix for every moment you are playing the guitar. The website doesn't state it, but they are making a claim to 1ms round-trip latency in the worst case. If your first strum of the guitar convinces you that the resulting sound is happening immediately, then every subsequent strum must also sound like it's happening immediately, too. Users don't merely rant about a sporadically janky digital instrument as if it were your run-of-the-mill Windows 10 UI. They throw it out.
3. There's something I call El Dorado latency, which is always half the latency being claimed and is eternally sought after by users. (Works for system latency, round-trip latency, etc.) Since the unit for measuring audio latency is milliseconds, and since "1" is the last whole number greater than "0", a claim of 1 ms essentially short circuits the search. E.g., if they had claimed "2" then El Dorado latency requires the user to imagine how much better the system would sound at "1". :)
4. Okay, I'm being a butt in #3 above. Round-trip latency in audio seeks to go down to "ultra-low" latency measurements for the same reason gamers want frame-rates to go up to gazillions. In each case it means developers can choose one of the following for their end-users: a) add more hungry, hungry hippos per unit of time, or b) make the same number of hippos hungrier.
Edit: clarifications
Half of 1 millisecond is 0.5 milliseconds.
Just because their published latency is the “smallest whole number” as you seem to be pointing to - doesn’t mean that it can’t be halved. What a strange thing to say.
Ableton measures latency down to the tenth of a millisecond. It’s really not a big deal.
Jitter is killer though - if the latency is randomly changing it's really annoying.
Or is this just meant as a visualization of latency in these scenarios versus what it would be like with musicians playing x ft apart from each other in a room?
Since I only used acoustic drums until then I never gave much thought to the idea of having your drums sound delayed. It was quite eye opening.
It is relevant, and monitoring via headphones or a floor speaker is a mitigation.
It's also a problem for large orchestras. If everyone else just plays along with what they hear from the people near them, the timing is going to be inconsistent across the orchestra pit even if you have some obvious audible reference like loud percussion. The mitigation is to orient yourself as much as possible around the visual cues from a conductor.
"If the system processing your signal introduces a 20ms delay, it would be the same as standing 20feet away the loudspeaker you're using as reference."
Do you have any research you can suggest for that 5ms number?
[0] http://www.klabs.org/history/history_docs/reports/dfbw_tomay... (Keeping the delay at or under 10ms was the recommendation I got from the study P.I.)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mp.2006.24.1.49?seq=1
And another (follow the links to the article, but I thought that particular graph was most informative) :
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Audio-latency-tolerance-...
One issue is when you get some acoustic sound too (open headphones, bone conductance, singing) and pretty much any delay in the headphone signal causes phase interference.
Did you ever see people who try to sing with headphones with a delay of around 200ms? That really messes up your performance.
At 10ms (and possibly less), you will start to notice the lag and it will affect your performance.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-how-much-latency...