You can notice a microphone sound problem, which is a delay between speaking into the microphone sound and hear sound from your computer speakers or headphones while using a digital audio system like a USB microphone sound. The analog signal picked up by the microphone sound part must be transformed into a digital signal that your machine can interpret.

How audio delay is formed 

First, let's figure out how microphone sound problems are caused and what happens when this audio signal is recorded on a computer.

The microphone sound measures the pressure changes in the air and outputs an electrical signal with the corresponding voltage changes. Professional microphone sound companies call this signal an analog because the changes in electrical potential are analogous to the pressure fluctuations that make up sound.

A device called an analog-to-digital converter measures or samples the oscillating voltage at regular intervals and reports these measurements as a sequence of numbers.

The sequence of numbers is packed into the appropriate format and sent over an electric line to the computer. The software on the PC writes this data to memory and to disk, processes it, and "sends" it back so that it can be converted back to an analog signal. This process is performed using a digital-to-analog converter.

This is a rather complex sequence of actions, which depends on the speed and reliability of the signal transmission.

Signal buffering 

To make the system more reliable, each microphone sound sample is not recorded and played back as soon as it "arrives". Instead, microphone manufacturers make the computer expect to receive several tens or hundreds of samples before processing them. The same thing happens at the exit. This process is called buffering and makes the system more resilient to unexpected failures. The buffer acts as a protective net: even if the data stream is momentarily interrupted, it is capable of outputting a continuous sequence of samples.

So the larger the buffer size, the higher the system's ability to cope with unexpected situations, and the less time is spent on processing. But there is also a drawback associated with a large buffer size: the buffering process takes longer, and at a certain moment, the signal outgoing from the computer begins to noticeably lag behind the microphone sound source being recorded. In some situations, this is not a microphone sound problem, but in many scenarios, it is definitely the case. Whether musicians listen to themselves or colleagues while recording or performing, it is very important that the microphone sound delay never becomes audible.