It is mostly hardware dependent. Most people don't have a clue what they are talking about. The software layer is only there to take care of buffering going towards the hardware and conversions that needs to happen such as resampling. When it comes to low-latency, the difference lies in how that buffer is handled. Otherwise you can always play in bit-perfect mode where no software changes anything in the stream. I gave a small overview of it in this section: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.ht...