New Gear wish list, what would you like to see made?

Well, a dedicated processor generally is polling while doing a single job. A computer processor is threaded and has tons of interrupts to deal with, and therefor will always add more latency than any dedicated design, unless that design is just poor. Apples and oranges.

Are you thinking the hardware L2 is analog? It's not.

The fastest an electrical signal can move on an ideal trace is 186,280 Miles per second, otherwise called "the speed of light".

If you had a transmitter that could operate at the speed of light, then the propagation delay on an actual trace is affected by the dialectric constant of the PCB material and it's parasitics.

I deal with FR4 pcb material most of the time, so it's dialectric constant (Er) is around 4.0. If you had a transmitter that could work at the speed of light, then the square root of the dialectric constant would be your effective distance traveled per second.

In this case, it's 186280 miles/second x 63360 inches in a mile for 11802700800 inches/second. 11802700800 inches/second divided by sqrt/4= 5901350400 inches/second. Turn this into something more readable, becomes 5.9 inches/nanosecond, which is roughly half the speed of light. The nanosecond is also called the "light-foot" since 1ns is how long it takes light to travel 1 foot.

In any case, the trace's propagation delay is negligible. What is really the gating factor is the slew rate of the analog input components so that no signal is lost between input of the device and the input of the A/D, but generally these parts have no measurable propagation delay, the A/D only suffers by working at the clock frequency. What is also important is the sample rate of the A/D, however that is generally constant. The only part that is left is the processor, which can either be constant in it's processing of the datastream from the A/D or it can be threaded with interrupts which means that it only pays attention to the data from the A/D when it's told to do so.

As with any other computer program, you know that sometimes having a bunch of windows open can slow down games and other things. this is because everything else that is running is requesting CPU time for various tasks. Kernel threads and other low level systems have priority and will essentially "tell" non essential programs to wait until later.

Due to this, most plug ins have specific amounts of time that are designed into worst-case scenarios. So while the operation might actually take 1ns(same as 1GHz), the worst case time to get results might be 100ns(0.1ms) to 500000ns(50ms).

This is all while a dedicated processor might be running at 100Mhz, which is about 10ns. However, by being dedicated, the likelyhood of long delays is pretty much eradicated.

After this page, I'm wishing I could download this info direct to my brain. It's great to have some cats here who know their shit though.

Something simple to add to my wish list, a guitar amp that sounds as good as a Blankenship Leeds 21 for under a grand. 

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see Universal Audio (only because they happen to own all the IP to do it NOW) build a stand alone DAW. Having just sold my Akai I used for a decade--this is what it would take for me to pay their heavy asking price for their plug ins. Actual closed solution. A box that I can count on to have digital hardware latency (sub couple ms)....think about it--they already own the plug in models of the classic hardware, have plenty of experience making great preamps...own the IP for the 2192-still considered one of the best converters in history...just a box you buy that takes care of all a project studio needs. It's time. The analog models aren't getting better. There's no disk bottleneck for track count or need for fancy RAID arrays-basically, the paradigm of the audio DAW is mature. So, now let's make it bulletproof and simple to buy/set up. Transparency be damned. Sound good. Musical. CLASSIC. Make the track arm button have a couple colors--off, on, and on+tape. Why have to insert tape plug ins and mess with biasing? C'mon. Globally set the bias to whatever you like and let's roll.

No drum replacement. No virtual instruments. No third party plug ins. Just a machine with a nice UI--both physical and via LCD...that routes and acts like a virtualized "vintage studio".

I'd like to see an outboard, high quality hp/lp filter box in banks of 8 for a decent price. I'm probably going to build the harrison ford filter box, it's not cheap, but supposed to have a ton of vibe harrison 32 style? 

I just want a Burl Bomber A/D for under $500, that's all... for now

For sure I'll look into the Russ Martin, but it'll be a month or two until I consider buying anything anyway.

I would love a room to record in. like, a real room with wooden walls, that would be big enough to track a jazz trio or quartet with( full 6' grand, upright bass, drumset, horn). a room that i owned as part of my house. I'm good on the gear front. i'm just still stuck in a bedroom.

I wouldn't fret too much though, your still making great sounding music in a bedroom.  

Yeah, but you don't get that vibe that you get from a nice live room, you know?   There's clothes and junk lying around that you gotta move to make room for the mic stands, and find the spot on the floor that doesn't squeak when you stand on it lol.   Stuff like that..