I bet somebody has a Gnu/Linux rig using ALSA with well below 5ms round-trip latency, too. The plus to CoreAudio is that any system it runs on has probably bee

I bet somebody has a Gnu/Linux rig using ALSA with well below 5ms round-trip latency, too. The plus to CoreAudio is that any system it runs on has probably been designed so that a non-technical user can get something like the low-latency you're describing by default. The minus is that hardware probably costs at least $800, and CoreAudio doesn't support things like the RPI. The plus to ALSA is that it runs on things like RPI, with the minus that non-technical users probably won't get round-trip latency below 5 ms without paying someone Mac-level money for hardware designed especially for Linux audio.