[amluto]

This is not straightforwardly true. Using small buffers and real-time scheduling works, but it gives terrible power efficiency on a modern high-performance CPU. What you actually want is a scheme with large buffers that can throw out those buffers if something requiring low latency happens.

[snovv_crash]

A lot of usecases require the audio to be low latency all the time. And I don't just mean professional recording studios or musicians, super mainstream things like gaming (especially VR) are way more immersive with low latency audio.

[jacquesm]

And video conferencing also gets a lot easier, echo cancellation is so hard when you have a lot of data in flight because you will have to do auto correlation on a much larger amount of data.

[amluto]

Video conferencing also fundamentally wants low latency.

Listening to music, on the other hand, does not require low latency except in response to user input.