A few years ago I got into a project that involved pretty tight control of audio latency, in a system with a fair amount of legacy.<p>&quot;How hard can it be?&quot;<p>At the end of a year, imagine someone who has spent a year in the Alaska wilderness, strangled three grizzly bears with his bear hands, lived on berries and nuts and fish caught in frigid glacial streams, and generally been up and down the audio stack in the OS and a couple pieces of firmware, involving audios APIs, a USB software stack that we re-wrote, a close examination of USB hardware and how chipsets are fucked up, and how exactly I2C microphones really work. My wife described me as &quot;broken&quot;. It took a while to recover.<p>How hard can it be? Isochronous, low-latency audio can be pretty hard.