Latency of USB microphones? – Gearspace.com

A USB mic is just a mic with a simple audio interface built in. One way (input) latency could be anything from 2 to 20ms depending on buffer size and sample rate and drivers. Round trip could be anything from 5ms to 50ms based on the same factors, plus any latencies from software.

What JLast is talking about is ‘direct monitoring’ features. Often interfaces, and definitely with mixers, possibly on some USB mics too (?) there are features that let you hear what is coming into the device direct via hardware, via onboard DSP routing/mixing/effects or through direct send-back from the audio device drivers for latencies ranging from essentially none, to microseconds, up to a few ms but less than the DAW round-trip nonetheless.

So … like a lot of these things … it depends …