There has recently been a resurgence of requests on the Digidesign User Conference for Pro Tools to automatically adjust for plug-in/convertor delays. Often people point to Pro Tools LE and its "automatic plug-in delay compensation". It's mostly true that in LE you don't get plug-in delays (and extremely nice it is too), but it's not really that LE has an active compensation scheme. What's really happening is that, being host-based, LE uses a processing buffer, so there's effectively a delay on everything all the time. Therefore, if all the plug-ins can get their maths together in the allotted time everything will all come out at the other end with no relative delays. However, with really meaty plug-ins like Maxim that handle large chunks of data at once, delays are still incurred.
So why can't Pro Tools just look at the TDM delay in each track (it already knows that, after all) and adjust the playback time in the timeline to compensate? This is exactly how the new MTS (MIDI Time Stamping) system will work on MIDI tracks in PT6. Eventually PT will probably be able to do something similar with audio, but it's actually a bit trickier than it sounds. Firstly, an audio track might have sends going to more than one place, incurring different delays along the way. Also, some sound elements (or even all) may not be audio tracks, but external sources coming in via auxes: You can't shift them earlier without introducing a global mixer buffer (and destroying the whole point of having a TDM system) or travelling backwards in time...
