Analogue-sequencer

> > thirdly, 5mS is an age- easily enough that if you delay the left
> > channel by 5mS relative to the right, it will affect the perception
> > of direction.
> 
> Agreed. Once you get to the 7-8msec range you can "feel" a delay  
> between hitting a key on a keyboard and hearing the attack of a note.

As with many functions of the human brain, the perception of timing of
auditory events is not a simple process.
As Duncan mentioned, the brain uses time difference between left and right,
as well as the filtering effects of head shape, to extract directional
information from the same sound arriving at both ears - but the brain must
still perceive these events as the same sound occuring at one moment.
Ear to ear time delays are tiny - no more than half a millisecond or so, but
the brain also has to deal with multiple-path arrivals of the same sound,
which can be spread over a longer time up to 10 or 20ms.
There are theshold levels around which our perception of what we're hearing
will change, and these are different for different people.
According to papers I've read, and tests I've done myself, time delays
between distinct acoustic events only start to become perceptable around the
5ms mark (if you ignore effects such as comb-filtering).

If you're careful not to load up MIDI with too many simultaneous events, and
prioritise percussive sounds, you can avoid causing much damage to feel.
Personally, I recommend the use of devices optimised for transmission of
monophonic note data from a small number of tracks, say 8 or so...

To come back to the point about timing resolution, if your timing resolution
is already finer than the brain's resolution of the relative timing of
sounds, what would be the advantage in increasing the resolution further ?

Best regards,
Colin Fraser
Sequentix Music Systems Ltd
http://www.sequentix.com