Elektron Musical Instruments

For those of you who consider that 2.5 milliseconds is esoteric when 
discussing tempo variation and well outside the range of human 
perception - here is a direct quote from the well respected John 
Klett from a published and detailed article from a few years ago 
called 'Delay in Large Format Digital Music Consoles'

"Feel is a very subjective thing. Let's define feel as the "relative 
placement in time of rhythmic elements". The character of each 
element will make its placement in time more or less a factor in the 
overall feel. The Snare drum has a large contribution to overall feel 
in your average pop mix. The only data we have on this at present is 
empirical. At one time Roger Nichols (Engineer for Steely Dan, Donald 
Fagan) is said to have defined the limit of feel perception at around 
250 microseconds for key elements. My own experience watching how 
certain producers place elements in time on digital audio 
workstations brings me to the conclusion that this perception limit 
is more like 100 microseconds. In any case, people who are very "feel 
conscious" will agree that we are looking at timing shifts well under 
a millisecond as important and affecting feel."

Even if you take Roger Nichols' figure of 250 microseconds - the 
acknowledged SPS-1 random timing variation of 2.18 ms between 
consecutive steps is over 8 times the perceived human limit of feel.

The entire article is here if you like a solid read:-

http://www.technicalaudio.com/reading/digitalconsoledelay.html

Roger Nichols is a legend in his own right and has a great website of 
very informative articles published in EQ magazine over many years.

http://www.rogernichols.com/index.html

Regards as always – David
www.innerclocksystems.com