Terrible Latency - not so with other engines

I've recently come close to finishing my first Unity mobile game and I started working on Audio. To my surprise, I noticed that every sound had a very noticeable delay (~0.5 seconds). I played around with the latency settings, buffer size, audio formats, load type, sample rate, etc., and absolutely nothing made a difference. I made sure there was no gap of silence in the audio file, I tried compressing the audio file to tiny sizes and I tried leaving it completely uncompressed. The latency always stayed the same.

I then decided to make a new Unity project; only one asset (a small audio file), no skybox and just one cs file with the following:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. public AudioClip AudTest;
3.  
4.     // Use this for initialization
5.     void Start () {
6.     }
7.    
8.     // Update is called once per frame
9.     void Update () {
10.         if (Input.touchCount > 0)
11.         {
12.             AudioSource.PlayClipAtPoint(AudTest, this.transform.position, 1);
13.         }
14.     }
15.  

Just a simple .apk file that does nothing except play a small audioclip when you touch the screen. Even this had the exact same latency issue that my full game had.

I started doing some research and I've noticed many people have complained about this in the past, and none of them have ever seemed to find a solution. It doesn't seem to affect everyone and seems very much to be device-related.

Now here's my issue. On the same device I have previously made games in Construct2 and GameMaker. Whist I'm not here to compare engines, neither of these 2 had any latency issues whatsoever.
Why is this? In most of the threads and questions posted about latency problems on Android it's always explained that this is a limitation with certain Android OS versions, that they don't have low latency drivers. This is obviously not the case.

So, I guess my question is, how on earth do I improve latency? Can I even improve latency? Is this something that Unity devs can fix? If not, this is a massive deal-breaker.

I am currently using Unity 5 but this problem occurs for me on Unity 4 also.

Thanks in advance!

 

Yes, unfortunately this issue still exists for almost 3 years now. My observations is that it's not related with OS version but the hardware. Different chipsets may have different audio drivers etc.. which may cause this issue.

 

Strange that the problem has existed for so long and Unity hasn't fixed it yet. I mean, I know it's hardware related, but Unity seems to be the only game engine that is experiencing this problem. Even far, far less advanced engines seem to somehow be able to handle audio on Android better than Unity can.

 

Sorry to double post but are there no members of Unity staff with an answer?

 

How about docs?

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-AudioManager.html

 

Please read my first post.