this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
487 points (86.8% liked)
PC Master Race
14670 readers
41 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.
Notes:
- PCMR Community Name - Our Response and the Survey
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You clearly haven't used wireless headphones in last 10 years, have you?
I have. You either get good sound quality or low latency. Pretty much every low latency wireless protocol (at least the ones I'm aware of) sacrifices bitrate for latency. I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but I can tell when sound quality isn't great.
I'm not saying there's no room for improvement, but you're basically describing the fundamental problem.
Higher quality audio tends to take up more data bandwidth in the wireless protocol, and resilience against interference (and retransmission or error correcting redundancy) will require a longer delay between receiving that signal and actually playing that signal. Some codecs make use of much more efficient ways of turning high quality audio into a lower bandwidth signal, but those usually come at the cost of computational complexity in encoding and decoding - which sacrifices the size and battery life of the wireless device decoding those signals. Or, some codecs allow for more efficient encoding or better error correction, but need to operate on bigger chunks of audio at a time, which might mean that the codec waits for an entire chunk to finish before it gets encoded and sent, which means that latency at a minimum is the length of the chunk. As a result, wireless audio transmission generally needs to trade between audio quality and latency.
With keyboard and mouse data, it's very, very simple. There are only so many possible keys/buttons, and even the mouse movement is essentially a two dimensional vector with an x-axis and a y-axis in the fixed amount of sampled time. That means less compression necessary to fit the data into very tiny slivers of time, that allows for the polling/refresh rate to be really high, and therefore communicate in a low latency manner.
Yup, this was pretty much supposed to be the point of the meme. Audio, unfortunately, is a much more difficult problem. It seems like we're getting closer every year though and I'm excited for when wireless audio is as good as wireless keyboards and mice.