Ya I was just coming here to say the same thing. 40ms _just in the codec_ feels like a lot. Because that's not even including time to pull in audio from the hardware (could be 20ms or more in Android devices), time to upload, and time to have it across the Internet, and then time to decode + play on the receiver. That adds up pretty quickly. I'm guessing 40ms was chosen because it is some sweet spot of having enough data to get a worthwhile compression on, but it's one of these things where technology, however impressive it might be, is slowly giving us a worse experience over time in the pursuit of digitization.