Audio latency issues between wireless earbud brands

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dofborg
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jul 31, 2020 2:29 pm

Audio latency issues between wireless earbud brands

Post by dofborg »

So this has been plaguing me for some time now and after scouring the forums and internet I still have no solution or ideas. It's long so bear with me, my apologies as this is my first post on the forum.

TL,DR: Zolo liberty wireless earbuds give ~100 ms latency through Voicemeeter Banana, all others ~500 ms and am at my wits end.

Background: I've been using Voicemeeter Banana for over a year now, and I while it took a bit to figure it out, I finally have it set up for consistent use while I stream (OBS), voice chat (Discord) and game. I set A1 to my speakers, A2 to my wireless earbuds while B1 is a Yeti mic. Windows 10, Intel wireless desktop card which is also bluetooth 5. I used to try to push music to the stream and not myself, or mix discord in and out, but mainly I like Voicemeeter for volume controls of my two outputs and quick on/off.

Problem: For a few years now, I've been using Zolo Liberty Plus earbuds which give me good battery life and the audio latency, while noticeable doesn't seem to hinder my gaming nor do videos look dubbed. Wanted to upgrade earbuds for longer life, maybe better features, etc, so I've ordered my 8th pair now from different brands and cost ranges ($20 - $200) and every single one results in ~500 ms latency, resulting in poor video and gaming. Sometimes, if I switch to the AG-Hands Free audio option, the latency will reduce to ~100 ms while the sound quality goes to shit. Switching back to Stereo, quality improves but latency goes back to being unmanageable. All this is approximated vs my speakers (0 ms delay) while listening to earbuds at the same time and watching latency test youtube vids.

Testing and troubleshooting: I've tried to align all the devices in Sounds to be at the same sample rate (DVD 48000 Hz), messed around in the buffering settings, re-paired the connections, updated drivers, nothing fixes it so long as I'm using Voicemeeter. If I listen to 3 devices all at once (speakers, Zolo's in one ear, new brand in the other), I can hear 3 different sounds one after the other. As soon as I shut down voicemeeter and output directly through windows, all wireless devices seem equal. I've been ordering and returning every earbud with a low audio latency claim (AptX), and now even have a Creative Audio AptX bluetooth receiver alongside Cleer Audio Ally Plus (AptX). I'm willing to bet there is something in the different audio codecs possible for these devices, but manually switching codecs is not an area of expertise for me. I have no idea how the Zolo's are doing this... Any thoughts, ideas or knowledge is greatly appreciated!
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