I'm looking to capture 4 channels of audio using small MEMS microphones like these, spaced less than a metre apart from each other in a grid to form a square microphone array.
[EDIT: This is so that I can develop a sound localization algorithm to find the relative position of the sound source wrt the mic array. As I'll be making use of time delay between the sound wave hitting each mic in turn, the relative latency needs to be controlled very tightly.
Latency-wise, for example if the distance is 0.5m between microphones, the delay between microphones will be about 1.46ms (best case, with the two mics orthogonal from the source). As the mics are likely to not be orthogonal the delay will be smaller than this. I'm guessing I'll need 0ms +/- 0.01ms relative latency]
Initially I'm just looking to develop the algorithm on a PC and need to capture the four audio streams to use as test data.
Initially I was planning to use an Arduino to interface with these little microphones and provide the data stream to a PC over USB however I've realised that it will not have enough memory or speed to capture and buffer / transmit this audio.
It is very important that the audio being recorded has close to zero relative latency between the four audio channels. I don't really care what the latency is overall, just the relative. It doesn't have to be CD quality as I'm expecting the audio quality to be bottlenecked by the small microphones.
USB audio interfaces seem like a good idea however I'm not certain of their relative latency performance for multichannel recording and not sure if they'd be compatible with a 3V3 signal.