Is there a guaranteed latency?
The end-to-end delay is about 10ms, according to this comment:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/i...
People use audio system at home to play electronic instruments. People also play video games. People do all kinds of stuff.
Latency is an important factor in these things.
Even videoconferencing and podcasting: With a microphone pointed at your face and a set of headphones used for monitoring that microphone, latency matters.
(It matters more to some people than others -- some people can tolerate hearing themselves later and continue to speak just fine, while some others increasingly sound like they're having a stroke as monitoring latency goes up and eventually become unable to produce coherent strings of phonemes.)
Latency is percievable by most people down to about 8-12ms .. lower than that and its harder to perceive, higher than that and you will get some people feeling like there are glitches in the audio ..
This is also important for musicians such as keyboard players, whose perception of their instrument is radically altered by that instruments latencies. Most modern synthesizers work very hard to get audio latency in their internal engines below 20ms ..