So I'm testing, via direct comparison, 2 different digital audio streams being fed into one dac.
One (my 'normal' setup) is via a Dante dedicated ethernet based pro-audio network and the 2nd stream is the newly added zone, which outputs to a direct (no other devices on this USB port) USB feed to the same dac.
When I link them so that they are synch'd, there are 1-2 second 'pauses' in the realtime playback stream.
These pauses stop when I unlink these 2 'players' but still have both playing the same selection of music.
It also should be noted both are using DSP with the same 7 processes operating.
I have not upgraded to v.23 yet and this could be a good experiment (to see if v.23 also exhibits the same behavior) if deemed as such.
For now I can link when needed and deal with the 'pauses' during evaluation time and then unlink and go back to adding more settling in time.
And since I'm running on a Mac Pro w/4 cpu's 16GB ram and SSD's with a ≈9% 'cpu load factor' even as I type this, h/w isn't really much of an issue.
JJ