This needs a big citation. It has always been claimed that AirPods have no discernible latency and every time it is tested it is actually pretty subpar (>150ms).
> Bluetooth "aptX Low Latency" has also been around for years, though adoption has been a bit slow. It is quite standard on Android phones
Almost no Android phones support it. Anything Samsung for example is excluded, even if they use Snapdragon Sound chips.
It is not really a technology problem, since I was doing 50ms latency with plain old HFP profile on BT 1.x back in 2002 with a Nokia and the cheapest headset. Latency has being going up even though nothing really changed in the underlying technology (Classic Bluetooth Audio is practically unchanged since Bluetooth 2 and LE Audio is used by almost no one).
The problem is:
- Consumers don't care (YouTube works well, after all)
- Everyone has an incentive to make it subpar so that they can promote their proprietary solutions. Qualcomm/CSR is _specially_ guilty of this, and they dominate the industry. But literally everyone is doing it these days (Samsung, Sony, Apple, etc.).
Here's one from 2022 (so AirPods Pro 2 and iOS 15 or 16), but: https://stephencoyle.net/airpods-pro-2
"As you can see, the second-generation AirPods Pro perform about 40ms better than their predecessors, with an average latency of 126ms vs the original’s 167ms.
"Perhaps a more interesting point to note is that the second-generation AirPods Pro perform only 43ms worse than the built-in speakers (at 83ms). That suggests that up to two-thirds of the time between touching the screen and hearing a noise occurs before Bluetooth data leaves the device. I think there’s still too much latency for audio feedback to feel snappy and responsive over AirPods Pro 2, but maybe at this point there are easier gains to be made by working to reduce the device-side latency."
Things may have gotten much worse recently as I distinctly remember the iPhone around the 4s-6s era having <30ms latency which was a huge advantage over Android.
The Apple Pencil can also go under 10ms latency when drawing, there must be a way of taking advantage of that for music apps?
e.g. rtings puts AirPods Pro 2 at 160ms https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a... (AirPods Pro 3 review is in progress)
and ComputerBase puts AirPods Pro 3 at 160-180ms. https://www.computerbase.de/artikel/audio-video-foto/apple-a...
Android audio stack is notoriously easy to make very very bad. Too many layers of software abstraction. Later upon layer of buffering. It’s all so bad. :(
But there is NO world where you are doing realtime playback/recording even with very loose quantization with an iPad and BT headphones. Maybe some day, but that day is not now.
Latency
- under 30ms = acceptable
- between 30-50ms = irritating but you can work around it
- between 50-100ms = easily detectable when you press a key and almost unusable
- above 100ms = patently absurd
And this is latency figures for laying down melodies. Latency needs to be even tighter when laying down drums.
The only decent wireless headphones I've ever used in a recording setting were AIAIAI TMA-2 Wireless+ [1] which uses a dedicated radio transmitter.
This is an old trope that needs to die. I used to play synths on a 1st gen iPad back in 2010, it had amazing <5ms latency at a time when you'd struggle to hit that on a PC using external hardware.
Wired headphones have always been around, even now all it takes is a $5 adapter. Bluetooth "aptX Low Latency" has also been around for years, though adoption has been a bit slow. It is quite standard on Android phones. On the Apple side, Airpods have had decent ~100ms latency for a few years (enough for casual gaming), and more recently have a custom wireless, low-latency lossless connection (Apple Vision only atm), and <20ms latency on the new iPhone 17 using Bluetooth 6.
It really is a wireless technology problem. Bluetooth LE audio only came around 2020, and barely adopted. Bluetooth 6 was announced late last year and just starting to show up in devices now.