Makes sense. My thinking was that I could possibly get lower latency and
less overhead if I only acquire two or four channels instead of 24 or 64
from which I leave the majority idle... But I understand its just now
how ALSA was designed.
Channel count is never going to affect latency unless you are do much processing that dealing with N times more channels takes you over the edge of what your CPU can do in a given time interval. While that's not impossible, it's also not likely.