What's a normal range for Bluetooth headphones? Because I was pretty amazed to still have audio playing on my AirPods being ~75m away from my phone. To be fair, there was nothing but a single pane of glass between the two, but still, that's quite the distance.

Just wanted to give a bump to this. I've been absolutely amazed with the range of my AirPods. They have the best range of any of the 3 pairs of bluetooth headphones that I own. Whereas my other 2 pairs will cut out if I leave my home office and go to the kitchen or the bathroom, my AirPods keep playing strong.

I'm really curious if this is a special function of the AirPods or Apple's W1 bluetooth chip in general. One of my other pairs is an older pair of PowerBeats sports headphones. I would definitely consider replacing them with a new set of BeatsX headphones if that's the case.

The main issue is likely to be latency and lack of existing low latency protocols - it's doable, I use jack over my network to watch video and voip apps like Mumble get pretty damn good with compressed audio, but most of the music oriented type stuff is high latency SHOUTcast or other http streaming type solutions, which tend to involve large buffers and stuff. There's just nothing existing which would feel correct for wifi headphones to my knowledge.

Battery life is probably an issue too, but with low power wifi SoCs like the espressif stuff, you can probably get away with similar to Bluetooth using the tech that's around now and doing as much possible in hardware and with interrupts as possible.

Latency is an issue for gaming or other real-time applications, sure, but I doubt 100ms would make much difference for listening to music or podcasts?

Custom radio on ISM bands, works flawlessly

Would imagine wifi sucks too much power

Consider that mobile phones exist.

(I am very happy with my wireless headphones.)