Okay, so this doesn’t really negate the test because it’s possible Cubase auto compensates and MOTU DP does not.
The only way to verify that is to do the test.
Analog gear, or more specifically, electricity does have a travel latency but it’s somewhere around 1 nano second per foot. It wouldn’t even make a discernible difference in phase that the human ear could hear.
There’s 1000 nanoseconds in a microsecond, and 1,000,000 microseconds in a second. To put that in perspective, an AD/DA Converter at 192khz sample rate, is specifying, 192,000 samples are being taken every second.
I’ve explained a number of times what the Measure Delay/Ping is for. A Lexicon PCM41 delay, is and old vintage digital 19" 1u rack delay. Because it is digital, it has to convert AD (analog to digital), run its DSP processing, and then convert Digital back to Analog (DA). This means this hardware has its own base latency that Cubase does not know about, and thus, has not taken into account for its compensation… Unlike your interface AD/DA which communicates to Cubase through drivers and ASIO protocol.
That is what the ping is for. I use it all the time, for a variety of digital hardware.