Discrete is what threw us. Is it a typo you used in the title and should perhaps have just been digital? Nice article, explains to people what is going on. We just got confused trying to use the title.
For what it's worth some people are extremely sensitive to it. I pianist friend of mine simply couldn't work with his piano because the cubase metronome click he played to was slightly out when he played. He used a keyboard with internal ok sounds, but has a nice vst sample based piano. Using the external piano sounds we sorted the replay delay by entering a time shift value as and saving the thing as a preset, but as soon as the vst was used it bent his brain. The MIDI delay, before it shows up in cubase, plus the small but present VSTi latency made it totally unworkable for him. His fingers told his brain he had played but his ears told him he hadn't, and for a concert pianist it was unworkable. However, playing his files on my i7 system was a mess, and restoring the time slip to 0 was the only way I could listen to them. He came to me, and as we work together on projects, I have the same piano he has and the same VSTi he uses. The delay on my system, both MIDI and audio latency was much smaller, and he could play happily here. The solution was simple. He bought a new PC, the same spec as mine, and he is now happy and time slipping is no longer needed. I didn't think PC processor speed had a huge impact on latency and that was just down to sample sizes, but I wonder if the MIDI data can be 'slotted' in more quickly? I'm not up on computers enough to know?
