Back in 1997-8, I ran across custom hardware that used this strategy to directly transfer large volumes of ADC data from the sampling hardware to a disk array.

Back in 1997-8, I ran across custom hardware that used this strategy to directly transfer large volumes of ADC data from the sampling hardware to a disk array. It made absolute sense given the the data volumes involved. (100-200MB/sec to persistent storage, which was a lot for commodity hardware back then.) Audio is full orders of magnitude less data and this is on hardware that's 20 years newer. With any reasonable buffer size this is a slam dunk, unless perhaps you're really concerned about latency.(In which case automatically streaming multiple megabytes of audio data across DMA isn't going to help you either.)