2013, so computers >> faster than human hearing so the following probably doesn't matter but devils advocate : memcpy puts stuff in the heap instead of the stack, which requires a malloc, a system call, which could introduce some latency. Then layer on that our audiophiles are probably listening to ridiculously high bit rate audio which results in large files, such that without swap buffering there may be some periodic buffer-play-buffer artifacts introduced. This is why you buffer but [new] is also a heap allocation, so same syscall, shouldn't be any different. Is it calloc? calloc in theory should be worse.