Zero latency monitoring has nothing to do with monitoring with realtime effects, unfortunately.
Zero latency monitoring simply means that inputs are routed to outputs when recording, such that there will truely be no latency....UNLESS you're doing any kind of processing to the input stream.
Latency is all about balance. The fewer tracks you're working with and the fewer simulataneous effects, the lower the latency you'll be able to achieve. Thus, it's common to work on projects in small chunks. That is, if you want to add a guitar part to a 24 track project and you want to do some realtime effects to it while playing, then you can create a quick mixdown of your project and play the guitar to that, and then import the new guitar track into the actual project. and so on...
I easily get <10ms using ASIO or WDM without any trouble with my Delta 1010 if I keep the project lean (on an old 850Mhz Celeron machine). For normal mixing and such I just crank the buffers up to about 50ms of latency, because it's not really noticable while mixing, and it's worse to have dropouts than a tiny bit of latency when moving faders.
Slackmaster 2000
