Latency is a bitch :/ I don't struggle with latency at the moment really, running on 6.4-6.7ms effective latency through DAW monitor. Atm I'm running a internal PCI sound card, M-Audio Audiophile 2496. Ancient medieval technology, but the asio driver is pretty good. What really is a bitch with it is that I only have two inputs and two outputs. I don't necessarily need more than two inputs right in this moment, but I'd like to be able to use some headphones for reference without having to export the bloody thing every single time. It's also got PMS once a month where it randomly decides to change to 48khz sample rate and lock itself at that for no apparent reason, which is annoying at best.
Friend of mine is using a fucking creative soundblaster card from 97 for making music, I shit you not. He's using WDM or MME or something, it's terrible at least. He records using DI as monitor because whatever drivers he's using now gives him so much latency it sounds like he's playing with a delay pedal on with the original signal volume turned off. And he's been using it for years now :|
Sir, maybe ye would like to buy a monitor controller http://www.thomann.de/de/sm_pro_audio_mpatch_2.htm / http://www.thomann.de/de/presonus_central_station_plus.htm / http://www.thomann.de/de/mackie_big_knob.htm)? Until you get a computer with firewire ports you could use that for headphone monitoring, if that's all you're missing with your current setup. or maybe I just got you wrong. Why do you have to export the track to listen to it with hp?
Aaannnd yes, those people with the extreme latency stuff are amazing I also know a guy with EXTREME high latency in his signal roundtrip but he got used to it and is now able to hit the notes in a way (early, totally out of sync with the track is playing over) that they when they come out of his monitors match the backing track again