There is a movement underway to move audio processing off the host processor and onto dedicated hardware intended for audio processing. However, there is a lot of information coming to light showing that offloading doesn’t provide many benefits for the most common use cases, and in fact the only scenario it may be useful is when using analog headphones listening to music for hours. Let’s flesh out what is truly useful, and what use cases justify the extra engineering, expense, and segmenting required for hardware offloading on the most popular computing platforms.