[izacus]

Well, all the effort is regularly defeated by poor hardware - you can have 40ms latecy in the video call stack, but when people attach Bluetooth headphones which buffer everything for 300ms there's nothing really to be done.

(Be gentle on your coworkers and use cabled headphones.)

[bufferoverflow]

LLAC/LHDC LL bluetooth codec adds only 30ms.

AptX low latency codec adds only 40ms max.

Just buy headphones with good low latency support. They aren't even expensive anymore.

[dan-robertson]

Bluetooth audio is a mess of compromise. The default sbc codec is basically fine for low latency but the parameters are all pretty terrible. Everyone uses the same few default parameters which neither give particularly high quality (especially for two way audio which was designed to be compatible with phone quality), nor low latency (especially for the high quality a2dp profile). One issue is that the designs/defaults haven’t really been updated since about 2000, and the parameters are very hard to change, typically the OS’s preference is hardcoded somewhere (also, whichever device initiates the connection gets to choose the parameters so even if you configured your computer to choose “better” parameters, it would all be for naught if you let the headphones connect to the computer rather than the other way round). The other issue is that Bluetooth is quite severely bandwidth constrained and higher bandwidth could theoretically give lower latency.

[snvzz]

>LLAC/LHDC LL bluetooth codec adds only 30ms.

"only" is positive thinking.

I do play some rhythm games (LLSIF, deresute, mirishita) on Android. The difference between "only adds 30ms" and plugging my headphones directly to the headphone jack is the difference between unplayable and playable. The games do have a latency compensation setting (with a calibration procedure), but compensation is no substitute for the real thing: Low latency.

[fomine3]

LLAC/AptX LL isn't adopted well on host device now, especially on Apple devices.

And even 30ms delay, using it on headphone/mic and both talker means 3022=120ms delay.

[Filligree]

Okay, but I want to wear wireless headphones.

Why can't I have both? Wifi doesn't seem to have this latency problem.

[izacus]

How do you know? :)

The latency doesn't come from bluetooth radio part itself (there ARE low latency BT headphones after all).

It comes from the fact that all audio is encoded (usually into SBC or AAC or AptX), transmitted and then decoded in the headphones. And each of those steps has buffers. And those buffers are configured by the manufacturer.

The bigger the buffer, the more stable the audio connection - there's less stuttering, less dropouts. But every buffer in the chain adds latency.

So why can't you have both? You sure can. You just need to somehow find headphones and a PC that doesn't add latency to bluetooth. Sadly that's not something that's usually documented in technical specs.

[novok]

Or use wireless mics that don't use bluetooth and are dedicated to low latency wireless audio. Like the ones they use for theatre: https://www.adorama.com/alc/how-to-choose-a-wireless-microph...

[smabie]

Wifi's latency has a high dispersion. I've seen absolutely terrible wifi latency, and latency that is under 1ms. wifi degrades gracefully, which makes it really tough to work with.

But pretty much all serious gamers use an ethernet connection because wifi is a pain in the ass. In fact, the first thing a support representative for any game will tell you when complaining about excessive lag is to try a wired connection.

[wazoox]

WiFi has terrible latency. Try playing a multiplayer FPS with wired networking and compare with WiFi. Or simply use remote desktop with WiFi.

[Dylan16807]

Whatever wifi you're using is probably overloaded. You can easily have a one millisecond ping to your access point.

[wazoox]

I have an under 2 ms ping to my AP, but WiFi has terrible buffer bloat, so ping latency doesn't mean much actually.

[Dylan16807]

Any idea what the state of the art is for reducing buffer bloat on access points?

And you can mitigate that by not using tons of bandwidth in the background while gaming.

[snvzz]

Terrible latency _and_ packet drop.

I only use wifi where I cannot attach a cable. I will run 15m ethernet cable on an apartment's floor if I have to, in order not to have to use wifi.

[KallDrexx]

I believe RF based wireless headphones (like my Arctis 7 headphones) don't have this latency in them due to not being Bluetooth based.

There is some patented codec I think that does allow low latency bluetooth streaming (forgot the name) but that's not heavily implemented in my experience.

[namibj]

Old-school BT headsets are low-latency enough, afaik. But yeah, just blasting the Opus directly from the network to the headphones would solve it, even re-coding in low-latency configuration only adds 5ms.

[izacus]

You probably mean AptX Low-Latency. I haven't seen it a lot and it's basically just AptX with tweaked buffer sizes.

[jfkebwjsbx]

> Wifi doesn't seem to have this latency problem.

Wifi is one of the best things you can do to add unreliability and latency.