Doepfer

ah yes, exactly what i thought but put in much better & clearer terms! 
standalone hardware dsp is always hampered by the double-whammy of whatever its own processing horespower ceiling is PLUS having to manage AD/DA conversions in Real Time, and that will be the case until someone time travels and steals a tachyon-accelerator from the Enterprise or TARDIS to couple with the AD converter, so the signal gets into the unit a few nanoseconds IN THE FUTURE, thus offsetting the latency..... 

"You're a very silly person and i'm not going to interview you..."

;-)
(seriously though, thanks for the info and expertise! and again, the Roland book is wonderful!!)

      From: "florian anwander fanwander@mnet-online.de [Doepfer_a100]" <Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com>
 To: Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com 
 Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2015 1:50 PM
 Subject: Re: [Doepfer_a100] Vocoder
   
    Hello Christian

Am 23.07.2015 um 21:17 schrieb christian ienni ienni23@yahoo.com 
[Doepfer_a100]:
> specific question for your (and anyone's) expertise and experience: how
> do software/computer-based plug-in digital vocoders compare with
> hardware digital units when it comes to such timing issues? i imagine
> with plug-ins/dsp there are coding tricks one could do to tweak things
> to work faster, or at least seem to, especially on a pc with enough
> horsepower.
You cannot compare a DSP-based hardware device, that has to work within 
an analog audio environment, with a plugin that works in the virtual 
audio environment of an DAW. In the box (=in the DAW) you will always be 
able to add an offset delay to each signal individually, so you cope 
with the latency of the plugins.
In the hardware audio world you won't have delays, for each and every 
audiosignal.

Florian