>Psychtoolbox>PsychSound

InitializePsychSound([reallyneedlowlatency=0])

This routine loads the PsychPortAudio sound driver for high-precision,
low-latency, multi-channel sound playback and recording.

Call it at the beginning of your experiment script, optionally providing
the ‘reallyneedlowlatency’ flag set to one to push really hard for low
latency. Redundant calls within one session will be ignored, only the first
call counts. However, redundant calls with contradictory settings of the
‘reallyneedlowlatency’ flag will print a “don’t do that!” warning, so if you
want to truly switch the ‘reallyneedlowlatency’ parameter, e.g., between
running different experiment scripts, you must call ‘clear all’ to reset
everything first.

On macOS and GNU/Linux, the PsychPortAudio driver will just work with
low latency and highest timing precision after this initialization.

On Microsoft Windows, things are a bit more complicated:

PsychPortAudio on Windows supports three different Windows sound systems,
MME, WDM/KS and WASAPI. Only WDM/KS and WASAPI are suitable for research grade
auditory stimulation with support for multi-channel sound cards and for
high-precision and low-latency sound timing and time-stamping. If you
want reliable timing and time-stamping with latencies and accuracy better
than 500 msecs, you *must* use one of these. By default, in low latency mode,
WASAPI is used on Windows Vista and later, whereas WDM/KS would be used on
older Windows versions. WDM/KS is completely untested so far, and WASAPI has
only been tested on Windows 7 and Windows 10. For best results, use of Windows 10
is recommended.

The Windows MME (MultiMediaExtensions) sound system has typical latencies
and inaccuracies as high as 500 msecs. WASAPI can achieve latencies as low
as 10 msecs with onboard sound chips on Windows-10, and maybe even on Windows 8.1.
On Windows 7 latencies around 20 msecs are possible. Timing should be generally
accurate to millisecond level with WASAPI.

Using macOS or Linux will usually get you at least as good, or usually better,
results with most standard sound hardware, due to the technically superior
sound systems of these operating systems.