This is why I'll never buy a DAC that doesn't have a headphone monitor output on the front panel! The performance of low-latency audio has gotten worse over ti

This is why I'll never buy a DAC that doesn't have a headphone monitor output on the front panel! The performance of low-latency audio has gotten worse over time, not better, at least on the Mac. (It was better under OS 9 than anytime since, I think.) Another fun test you can do, if you have an analog mixer, is to run some input signal into the mixer, then to the PC, and then from the PC back out, and monitor both the original input and the signal from the PC at the same time. OS-supplied drivers typically make it sound like you're in the Grand Canyon. But even with very expensive low-latency gear, you can still tell if you put one signal into the left headphone channel and another into the right. If there's actually zero latency, you'll perceive the sounds as coming from directly in front of (some people perceive as directly behind) you. It'll sound just like mono. Any latency, given the same volume level, will be perceptible as a difference in "location" of the sound. My unscientific experiments suggest that you can perceive down to about 1ms latency quite clearly this way across most of the audible range. The minimum is frequency dependent (as you'd expect) with lower frequencies being less sensitive. Presumably the human brain has evolved to be extremely good at arrival time comparisons (maybe even doing some sort of phase-difference stuff) as a way of triangulating the origin point of sounds. There are doubtless other specialized ways in which the brain is equally sensitive, so the 100ms rule of thumb seems pretty naive to me. 100ms might hold true for the "main loop" of the human brain at the level of conscious thought, perhaps.