> dedicated hardware for sound decompression Do they? Most of "modern audio" is just software decoding/mixing to a pretty not-smart-Digital-to-Analog Converter

> dedicated hardware for sound decompression Do they? Most of "modern audio" is just software decoding/mixing to a pretty not-smart-Digital-to-Analog Converter. My educated guess is that most compressed audio formats are optimized for size, not for low latency recording/playback. Also one of the reasons why Opus is so good and is replacing lots of older formats.