this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Bluetooth's poor latency performance is quite a big problem. It makes Bluetooth audio peripherals finicky for watching videos, and unsuitable for gaming. Audio headsets for gaming use their own protocols, which annoyingly makes them incompatible with everything else.
This is not an issue of Bluetooth itself. Some audio devices include too large caches (because in the early days not having interrupted audio was a bigger deal than having video and audio synchronized), but you get Bluetooth audio devices just using the default SBC codec that don't have any noticeable delay. Using codecs like aptx adaptive fully solves the problem.
The reason you don't see BT gaming headsets is not latency, it's Bluetooth missing a proper mode to submit audio in high quality bidirectionally. Long story short: when you got high quality sound on your headphones, the mic of your headset is not in use. When the mic is in use, the quality of the headphones is reduced to basically telephone call quality.
There have been technologies trying to work around that, most important would probably be faststream, but it never really caught on. It's pretty
obscure still, you have to take care that all the devices and software you want to use support it, so I guess it's just easier and cheaper to get a dedicated wireless gaming headset with dedicated USB dongle.
At least since BT 5.0 I read stories that BT will be able to support gaming headsets aaaaany day now but well, nothing for now.
The new creative zen hybrid pro hybrid and pro sxfi seem to be advertised to use bluetooth 5.3 with LC3 and LC3+.
Tho not if they are on the market yet or if there are reviews.