Latency when recording voice through USB mic

[realvoiceover]

Using an AT2020 USB mic on an HP Pavilion with Windows 7, I'm experiencing a delay of almost a second between speaking and hearing the output on the monitor headphones. Any ideas how to fix?

[steve]

Turn off "Software Playthrough" (near the bottom of the Transport menu).

Next you're going to say that you now can't hear the mic at all while you are recording.
That's right.
There is no hardware link between the USB microphone and your sound card, so the only way to hear the mic signal during recording is if the software passes the signal from the USB input to the sound card output, but that takes time (mostly because of data buffering). The choice is that either you just listen to the sound being recorded acoustically (not via the headphones), or via the headphones with a delay.

This is a problem common to all USB microphones unless they have a headphone socket built into the mic itself.

If you use a recording program that supports "ASIO" (such as Cubase, Sonar, Reaper and others) then by using ASIO drivers you can achieve less of a delay, but there will still be some delay. Unfortunately Audacity cannot be shipped with ASIO support due to licensing restrictions.