Perfect? NO!
But the difference should not be perceptible to us mortals. You must be above that or have a error going on.
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Bluetooth Headphones with ZERO Audio Lag? Is this even possible??
- Thread starter joejoejoe
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Perfect? NO!
But the difference should not be perceptible to us mortals. You must be above that or have a error going on.
I love that the first sentence of the product description is "Note: please do not over charge !"
Yeah... I don't charge it while it is in my ear.
The Bose QC35 do not have noticeable lag. Beats studio 2, otoh, have it most of the time. It's not that much upsetting, but it is there.
The headphone jack removal is not the same as removing FDD or FireWire. Those had better alternatives replace them. Bluetooth and Lightning aren't definitively better. Bluetooth can be more convenient with having no wires, but it offers lesser quality audio. Lightning offers no real benefit over a dedicated headphone jack.
I use the Jaybirds Bluebuds X2 and there is zero lag. if I'm watching a video and someone claps, I hear it at the exact same time I'm seeing it. I actually just used them to watch a Facebook video of a bird throwing cups around and whenever the cups hit the floor and made noise, I would hear it instantly. There was no lag or delay between when I'd see the cup hit the floor and when I'd hear the sound. They happened at the exact same time. No idea how they do it, but it works flawlessly.
Eating my own words.
Just picked up a pair of Bose Soundlink Wireless On Ear headphones and tested with this vid
Zero lag.
Wow.
This is one of the reasons why I returned my bluetooth headphones, I felt the audio quality wasn't there in comparison to my wired headphones. But yes the convenience of not having a wire was fantastic.
If you wan to watch a video even with lagging headphones, just open it in VLC and use the J and K keys to delay the audio backwards and forwards. For most headphones you have to delay it minus 200 milliseconds, you do this by pressing J twice. Easy as pie!
Hey Joe,
I think you are wrong!
Let me check - have you tried the Video and simply press PAUSE?
I bet after PAUSE you will hear one acustic "Plong"
yes i have bose bluetooth headphones now and they have zero lag
if you go to the dialer in the phone app, do you hear the notes for each number when you tap them without lag?I use Beats Studio 2's and I have never noticed any lag with my Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV (4th Gen.).
I am excited to see this post. I have the Jaybirds 2 and the Jaybird Freedoms. Love the Freedoms but they had a huge audio delay. It was so bad I really just couldn't watch a video with them. After seeing the post how the software has been updated, I just tried them again with video and they are so much better - no discernible lag for me now.
My 500€ Sennheiser are synched perfectly with my iPhones but there is still a bit of a lag on my 2012 rMBP. Same lag as on my cheaper Sony Bluetooth Headphones. I guess the old macbook is to blame
They won't be perfectly sync'd, but neither will your wired ones. Just has to be close enough you don't perceive the difference. There's a sync problem in movie theaters and music concerts too, because the "video" (light) travels faster than sound. Same reason fireworks flash... then... boom.
The delay has to be much shorter than half a second for your brain to not notice-- not sure the exact number, but it's probably got to be in the 10s of milliseconds.
I drove myself nuts with lag questions for a few weeks after getting some Bose QC35s. Video conference calls on my Mac seems mistimed, movies seemed a little bit out of sync, all kinds of things felt weird.
The Bose also come with a wire, so you can wire them up or use BT and compare back and forth. Eventually I just decided that I everything seemed weird because I was suddenly paying attention to it-- I never actually tried watching an actor's lips before, and video conference quality is generally crap.
Once the neurosis passed, everything's been good.
You are not weird, it doesn't work. We pay a lot of money for sound and it's not working right.
Sound has (had) been reliably in sync with the moving image since the early 1930's. (synchronized sound started in general release movies in 1927 the projectionist dropped a needle on a record when cued by a dot on the movie. It actually worked pretty good. It certainly worked better than it does 90 years later). Synchronized sound seems to have been un-invented in the past ten to fifteen years.
I have a MacBook Pro (admittedly old early 2011) that I can either not hear from more than a couple of feet, or it's out of sync (Bluetooth) or external speakers connected to the earphone plug work intermittently (the logic board has been replaced 2-3 times). I'm now going to try fiberoptic. (It's cheap enough to waste my time.) I searched Apple's Customer Support Network (NotWork?) "Bluetooth audio sync" a whole list of things came up. Nothing relevant.
This is a joke--on us.
Why is it so hard to fix? It seems very consistent with different bluetooth devices little speakers that don't work very well are better, my Onkyo Stereo Receiver seems way off.
How about some code that could delay the video a bit to sync with the sound coming out of my bluetooth connected amplifier and speakers? The internal microphone could even pick up the sound of the bluetooth device and automatically sync the video to it. (I also thought I'd turned off the external mic. I just checked. It's on....) YouTube, The DailyShow, Comedians in Cars, Apple Key Note presentations..... all way out of sync. Very distracting.
Or have I missed something?
The whole question nowadays depends on usage. Bluetooth audio latency is REAL and is a technological constraint right now. HOWEVER. When audio is not dependent on user input, you'll experience no lag, because the software knows the amount of latency and compensates for that in the video playback. IF you use bluetooth headphones for music authoring with a MIDI keyboard or gaming, compensation is not possible, and the latency will be there.
This is really interesting. What does "When audio is not dependent on user input" mean?
I guess 'the software know(ing) the amount of latency and compensat)ing)' is not user accessible.
It could be so easy. Press a key when you hear the click, compensate for human response time, and it's synced.
I spent $6 and got an optical cable to connect my MacBook Pro to my Onkyo stereo receiver. Happy surprise, it seems to work really well (I've had perennial mini-audio plug connection issues with this computer. Optical seems much more reliable.) There's still a bit of audio lag, but tolerable. I also have an LG sound bar connected to my LG TV--no noticeable lag. Also connected optically. I'm guessing this might be why stereo receivers are different from 'theater sound systems' and may not be good to use for TV sound.
Audio latency (lag) when the user is 'music authoring' sounds intolerable. I'll bet after Beethoven was completely deaf, what he 'heard' in his mind had no latency issues.
I guess 'the software know(ing) the amount of latency and compensat)ing)' is not user accessible.
It could be so easy. Press a key when you hear the click, compensate for human response time, and it's synced.
I spent $6 and got an optical cable to connect my MacBook Pro to my Onkyo stereo receiver. Happy surprise, it seems to work really well (I've had perennial mini-audio plug connection issues with this computer. Optical seems much more reliable.) There's still a bit of audio lag, but tolerable. I also have an LG sound bar connected to my LG TV--no noticeable lag. Also connected optically. I'm guessing this might be why stereo receivers are different from 'theater sound systems' and may not be good to use for TV sound.
Audio latency (lag) when the user is 'music authoring' sounds intolerable. I'll bet after Beethoven was completely deaf, what he 'heard' in his mind had no latency issues.
This method couldn't work for user inputs because the system would have to anticipate input before the user had any input. If you touch the screen, the fastest the sound could come out of the headphones is the Bluetooth latency. I mean you could always delay user input affecting the screen but that would cause a much bigger issue.
"User input" in this case means, essentially, performing audio to pre-existing video and audio - old-fashioned over-dubbing, for example. If the audio system adds latency during performance (so what you hear in the headphones is coming back several frames after you perform it)... disaster.
If it's a playback-only situation (watching videos), there's nothing wrong with automated latency compensation. Sometimes, the audio has to be delayed to be consistent with the video, sometimes the opposite. As long as there's a time reference common to both audio and video, it's a matter of doing the math. Computers are really, really good at doing math.
The thing is, latency is not necessarily consistent. It depends on what caused the delay. Streaming media uses buffering to compensate for the inconsistent speed of the internet, computational bottlenecks, and the like. As long as the accumulated delays are shorter than the buffer, the stream flows smoothly. If the delays exceed the buffer length, the screen freezes/audio stops until the buffer can refill.
"Press a key when you hear the click" takes technology back nearly 100 years. The basic problem with headset latency is lack of communication between independent system components - the video system not knowing that the headphones have a latency of, say, two video frames (1/15th of a second), and/or being incapable of adding that compensation (delaying the video by two additional frames). You could design a system that allows for human feedback (press a key), or automate the feedback (headset reports the latency factor to a video system). Either way, the issue is that the video and audio systems have to be designed to communicate and compensate.
(added) And may I add,
Human response time is hardly a constant value like the speed of light in a vacuum. Not only does your own response time vary widely, but there's wide variation from individual to individual.
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What headphones? My AirPods and BOSE QC35 are perfectly in sync (and I'm super sensitive to a/v sync - even 25ms off drives me nuts).
For video BT should be fine. For gaming it's hopeless since the OS can't compensate for a moving sound target over BT, so it's really off in a/v sync.
They won't be perfectly sync'd, but neither will your wired ones. Just has to be close enough you don't perceive the difference. There's a sync problem in movie theaters and music concerts too, because the "video" (light) travels faster than sound. Same reason fireworks flash... then... boom.
The delay has to be much shorter than half a second for your brain to not notice-- not sure the exact number, but it's probably got to be in the 10s of milliseconds.
I drove myself nuts with lag questions for a few weeks after getting some Bose QC35s. Video conference calls on my Mac seems mistimed, movies seemed a little bit out of sync, all kinds of things felt weird.
The Bose also come with a wire, so you can wire them up or use BT and compare back and forth. Eventually I just decided that I everything seemed weird because I was suddenly paying attention to it-- I never actually tried watching an actor's lips before, and video conference quality is generally crap.
Once the neurosis passed, everything's been good.
Eh... if you are trying to do audio production with bluetooth, you are out of luck. The audio response to touch movements will always be delayed. Also games will be delayed. Videos can be compensated for because they delay the video to compensate for audio lag, but when audio timing matters, bluetooth doesn't work.
I'm curious. How much delay can be tolerated before the BT delay swamps human reaction times? Human reaction times are on the order of 100ms, but I'd think we're better than that at holding to a beat just because of the predictive nature of it.
Games have a ton of slop in them already and we handle it just fine. We use bluetooth game controllers which have the same kinds of delay, and we play multiplayer over the internet which has significant delays as well.
AptX low latency is better than 32ms end to end. Open air speakers 10ft away, would delay the sound about 10ms just going through the air.