3 ms·
How do Bluetooth headphones compensate for the latency?
by sansnomme 7y ago
How do Bluetooth headphones compensate for the latency?
- NikolaNovak 7y agoI haven't seen them compensate successfully for anything real-time (games). I've seen them compensate for things like movies; I assume they send Audio ahead of time, and "hold" back the video until it's in sync.
- cjrp 7y agoIn my experience, they don't; if I'm typing on an iPhone there's a noticeable delay between me tapping a key and hearing the sound in my QC35s.
- hprotagonist 7y agoThat's not the bluetooth latency you're hearing, that's just how active noise cancellation works. QC35s buffer about 75ms worth of ambient noise and then phase-invert it and play it back. This destructively interferes with the outside noise, and cancels it. But you have to sample your environment on some time window to get it to work, so when ANC is on, there's lag. This is also why ANC only works well for slowly-varying noise like airplane drone, but can't handle impulsive sounds like gunshots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control
- cjrp 7y agoInteresting, thank you!
- nickthegreek 7y agoApple uses a special chip, the W1 or H1 to resolve syncing issues. But that wouldn't work well for these situations as they cant control the visual syncing of a live person.
- iwalton3 7y agoThere are also lower latency bluetooth codecs. I use LDAC with my headphones on my computer, and I don't usually notice any latency.
- opencl 7y agoHow are you using LDAC with a computer? Windows and macOS don't support it, there's some fork of pulseaudio that has it for Linux but I never figured out how to get that working.