Audio latency problems. even with a sound card!

Hi guys, hoping you can help me out here.

I’m trying to make some audio reactive visuals. Nothing too complicated, simple kick drum trigger stuff. I have a mini fuse 2, which is my soundcard/audio interface. Macbook pro from 2020. I have checked the buffer length and at times, even changed it to 0.001 but this made no difference. It was still delayed by pretty much of a beat. My work around on the night was to set the buffer length to align with the next beat..

Might be worth noting that I’ve tried this on the Mac book. I mentioned and another MacBook from the similar era. I’m really hoping it’s not a hardware problem.
The microphone does a similar thing, but I put that down to the audio processing on the computer, not being fast enough to be real time. Is there a button and settings that I just need to click or a checklist? I would really appreciate any direction.

Cheers and sorry if I rambled on.