Absolutely. Musicians can feel latency as low as 1ms when playing a digital instrument. You bet your ass it matters to people used to immediate response.
I get that the rhythmic nature of music enables precision at the scale of a few ms because musicians can anticipate these moments in time (reaction time does not apply). But I'm baffled by claims of sensitivity to delays less than about 10ms because these are near or even over the limits of acoustics. For example, when you do the math, you'll see that it is basically impossible for a large enough orchestra to play perfectly in sync. But a good orchestra can give the impression of a precise performance despite that. This can only mean that the human hearing is less precise than what people claim.
What you can hear are changes in latency which get added to the constant time the signal travels to the brain.
I think it's more like an "equivalent time sampling" effect, and the perceived 1ms latency is actually a perceived phase shift.
With some training I could achieve >95% confidence in discernig 5ms with my headphones.
Age impacts the frequency range that most people can hear. That might be a factor here too. I'm in my mid 30s, are you younger?
Tests: http://whirlwindusa.com/support/tech-articles/opening-pandor...
It screwed me up so much from the delay that I had to take my headphones off when recording otherwise I couldn't put together a sentence.
This claims that for percussionists 20ms is too much but 10ms is not. As a bassist I disagree, and think under 5ms is acceptable.
Because tween gamers could totally tell when the lag gets above 10ms. Which is all well and good but 12 year old boys start throwing the game controller when that happens, which causes higher failure rates. Which means more warranty returns.
1. Your brain wants to move a muscle
2. The muscle moves
3. The effect of the move is processed by your brain
This is of course only true if there are no reference points with lower latency. E.g. if you drag an item across a smartphone, we notice tiny latencies, because our finger moves before the icon – something we can easily see.
It isn't about training and practice. There is just a physical limitation of being a human.
However, when given samples of audio with no delay and a 5ms delay. I, with no special talent and no musical training, was able to start accurately identifying the delayed audio almost every time after a few minutes of practice.
The difference isn't imperceptible when it comes to a single noise when we are specifically told to look for it, but I would bet that its imperceptible when it comes to just randomly listening to music.