What is the shortest perceivable application response delay?

Question

A delay will always occur between a user action and an application response.

It is well known that the lower the response delay, the greater the feeling of the appli

Answer 1

At the San Francisco Opera house, we routinely setup precise delay setting for each of our speakers. We can detect 5 millisecond changes in delay times to our speakers. When you make such subtle changes, you change where the sound sources from. Often times we want sound to sound as if it's coming from someplace other than were the speakers are. Precise delay adjustments make this possible. Sound delays of 15 milliseconds are very obvious even to untrained ears because it radically shifts where the sound sources from. A simple test is to prove this is to play sound through multiple speakers, and have the subject close their eyes and point to where the sound is coming from. Now make a slight change in the delay time to one of the speakers of just a few milliseconds, and have the person point again to where the sound is coming from. Making changes in delay times is acoustically very similar to moving the actual speakers.