It's much more efficient to work on an audio buffer than to do it one sample at a time, and the larger the buffer the more efficient. An analogy would be sendin

It's much more efficient to work on an audio buffer than to do it one sample at a time, and the larger the buffer the more efficient. An analogy would be sending 500 POST requests with a single JSON object as the body, or a single POST request containing an JSON array of 500 objects. Higan does allow you to reduce the application latency. But they make the point many times in the webpage that doing so can cause audio glitches, pops and distortion due to buffer underruns. My guess is they want to settle on the best default settings. Something that won't have a noticeable latency to most players, but also won't provide audio glitching when played on, say, an older laptop.