What other folks have their latency set at is irrelevant, unless they have the exact computer you have, with all the same programs and peripherals, all running exactly as you have yours set.
Click the P key on your computer keyboard to bring up MC 6's preferences. What are yours set to?
Latency around 10 ms is usually fast enough that the delay won't be noticable to folks with normal brains. Like me.

Thanks Greg! That makes sense, I'll try 10 and see what I get (I am at work now and can't look at my DAW). Thanks for the starting point/reference point opinion. It helps a bunch.
 
And thanks for the hotkey tip too - that's probably going to save me 10 hours of wasted time over my lifetime clicking through the menus. lol :D

Unfortunately the Alesis USB Mixmaster uses the USB Audio CODEC as it's drivers and it does not have native ASIO drivers.  Native ASIO drivers would give you much lower latency availabililty.
 
on my website I have some soundcard recommendations (although I admit I've not updated the list in way too long), but I do not ever recommend the Alesis USB mixer as a viable option because of their non-ASIO drivers and high latency.

Beagle, thanks for the reply. I am somewhat aware of the asio issue... on alesis' website it directed me to asio4all drivers which is working well. I have my pc's audio hardware disabled. So that said, any tips for asio in cakewalk would be appriciated as I am new to asio entirely :/

And thanks for the soundcard research. Unfortunately I'm on a laptop for now :/

yes, but ASIO4ALL is a bandaid, not a replacement for native ASIO drivers.
 
ASIO4ALL is actually a wrapper which makes the USB Audio Codec look like ASIO drivers to the host (MC).  it's good for stuff like this, but it's not as good as native ASIO drivers are.

I see... hmm. Hopefully I can live with it for now. I'll report back with how it went when I come back in range of the internet. *crosses fingers*