Bluetooth audio always arrives a little late. The phone has to buffer the sound, compress it and send it over the radio in packets, and the earbuds have to receive, decode and play it. For music nobody notices. For video, apps can hide the delay. For games, where a sound has to follow your tap instantly, the delay can be obvious. The fixes, from easiest to most reliable, are a game or low-latency mode, a low-latency codec or LE Audio gaming profile that both devices support, a dedicated 2.4 GHz or USB dongle, and a cable.
Why videos look in sync but games do not
When you watch a video, the player can delay the picture to match the sound, as long as it knows how late the sound is. Android's Bluetooth audio code shows how this works: a headset can report its own delay, the time from receiving audio data to actually playing it, and Android passes that figure on so playback can be adjusted. If no report is available, Android falls back to an estimate based on its buffer plus an extra 200 ms. The same code treats reported delays between 50 ms and 1,000 ms as plausible, which gives an idea of the range the system expects.
A game cannot delay itself to match your earbuds, because the sound is a reaction to what you just did. That is why the same earbuds can feel fine on YouTube and laggy in a rhythm or shooting game.
Samsung adds that sound lag can happen on any Bluetooth audio device, and that obstacles such as walls, metal or people, and interference from microwaves, Wi-Fi routers and other Bluetooth devices, can make the connection worse.
Published latency figures
None of the brand and codec pages used for this guide gives a latency figure for the standard SBC and AAC codecs, and real results depend on the phone, the earbuds and the app. The figures that are published come from codec and chip makers under their own conditions:
| Mode | Published figure | Conditions and caveats |
|---|---|---|
| aptX Low Latency |