Bluetooth ANC Headphones - Latency Issues?

[Komoda]

Hi guys,

 

I'm looking to buy a new pair of ANC Bluetooth headphones. I know there are a lot of great Headphones out there (Surface 2, Sony xm4, ....) but i am unsure if the latency with Bluetooth is going to be an issue for me. I know about aptx ll but most devices do not support it...

If i spend big (300€+) i want to be able to use my headphones for music, podcasts and movies both on the road and at home. Is latency still a big issue or is Bluetooth nowadays good enough to enjoy movies etc.?

[cloneman]

Like you said aptx-LL is vaporware on phones, because it need a hardware-level encoder.

However, android (and I assume iOS) devieces use a trick where they delay the start of  the video by 150ms or so to make sure it stays in sync with lagged bluetooth headphones. This seems to work well with Youtube, but doesn't work if the application doesn't support this feature (not sure if netflix does). Some random video playing inside your browser with jwplayer, for example, will likely be out of sync.

Use of BT on a computer could be a lot more hit or miss. And gaming for sure cannot delay itself to compensate for latency.

Long story short, it's non-issue when using Youtube , and probably netflix, with an android phone. If your movies are being played back from the phone's local storage, well, you can set a manual offset in BSPlayer if you want.

True wireless headphones are another story. Many of them use a mesh-type setup which adds another leg to the trip that the phone cannot compensate for. I would avoid those, although I don't own many pairs to confirm my theory.