Memcpy doesn't allocate stuff on the heap. Memcpy also doesn't care about whether you're copying to/from heap or stack memory (or a memory mapped file, or a mem

Memcpy doesn't allocate stuff on the heap. Memcpy also doesn't care about whether you're copying to/from heap or stack memory (or a memory mapped file, or a memory mapped camera buffer); memory is memory. If the computer isn't able to keep up with the playback, you would probably get extremely obvious sharp clicks, very far from "the sound has a slightly 'hard edge'". New and malloc are identical. Neither one will initialize any of the data. You also wouldn't call either in a loop; you would allocate a buffer once and then copy data into that buffer. You can see this in the code they posted: BYTE *sound_buffer = new BYTE [sizeof(BYTE) * nBytesInFile]; hr = mmioRead(hFile, (HPSTR)sound_buffer, nBytesInFile); That's the only memory allocation in the whole piece of code they posted. They're talking about the audio quality difference between playing audio from a single big buffer allocated by new vs playing from a single big buffer allocated by malloc.