>> "Digital tends to have more latency by its nature" - So...GPS satellites, atomic clocks, operation of a modern processor are full of latency that humans can detect? Human reaction time is in the order of 100ms. This statement makes zero sense. I honestly don't understand and I'd love you to explain what specific areas you think where this happens.
"I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ”
Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”"
I play an online game (Overwatch) and I can tell the difference between a 20ms ping and a 40ms one, so I’m not surprised that an extremely proficient musician with a lifetime of practice can tell a difference of a few miliseconds.
In high school physics we were doing some experiments around pendulums and used metronomes to measure the period; I remember the teacher telling us about a former student of hers, a concert level musician, who could keep a beat in perfect timing without using a metronome at all.
This statement does make sense in the realm of audio processing. Moving from analog to TDM Digital, to Packetized Digital audio does add latency. Compare an analog radio (either two way or broadcast) without any digital signal processing, with a analog one with signal processing, to a digital one - each step in there, the latency goes longer.
On a full duplex phone call, you can tolerate quite a bit of latency, upwards of 600ms, provided there is no echo, as soon as echo is present, we notice the latency - but even on echo free calls, the longer the latency, the more likely both parties will end up speaking at the same time.
Reaction time is not really relevant for musicians, they are more like operating on a continuous feedback loop with the sound and the instrument, so the sensitivity to latency is much higher. Afaik most good instruments aim to well below 10ms latencies.
And yes, digital audio typically inherently has some latency due processing typically being based on some buffers. Sure, you can try to make those buffers smaller but that is not always so easy to do.
Musicians can detect latency as little as 1ms. It changes the "feel" of the instrument/equipment. It took until recently for digital gear to feel similar to analog, because it's an enormous engineering challenge to get digital equipment to be as responsive as the simplest analog equipment.
