Expected latency while streaming audio with Bluetooth LE

[Francisco_32]

Hi everyone. I'm posting for the first time in this forum and English is not my first language so sorry for any mistakes 😉.
I'm trying to find out if it's possible to live stream audio using Bluetooth LE 4.X technology maintaining a very low latency. Namely below 10 ms. I'm trying to live stream a music instrument via bluetooth and the difference between the instant the instrument is played and the musician hears it should be negligible.
I'm asking in particular for the BLE because of what i saw in this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy.
In the technical specifications it says: Latency (from a non-connected state) 6 ms. but i cant find where that value came from and even so i don't know if that is the value that I'm looking for.
Thanks!

 

[bill001g]

The bluetooth delay is only part of the problem. Unless the device producing the signal is already digital you are always going to encoding delays. The more devices the signal passes though the more delays you see. Video stuff is huge as in seconds, audio is likely much less but you can easily detect 100ms so it does not take much delay to cause issues.

 

[Francisco_32]

The bluetooth delay is only part of the problem. Unless the device producing the signal is already digital you are always going to encoding delays. The more devices the signal passes though the more delays you see. Video stuff is huge as in seconds, audio is likely much less but you can easily detect 100ms so it does not take much delay to cause issues.

 

[Francisco_32]

I'm aware that the bluetooth is only one of the elements adding delay but I'm guessing is the one thats adding the most. The value of 100ms is also for BLE?
Thanks for the reply!

 

[bill001g]

I do not think the latency will be affected by the signal levels. It should only affect the distance the signal travels. If the signal is damaged the data will just be lost. The newer blue tooth implementations have less delay but I never bothered to look into this.

The delay in general is not going to be huge, people use bluetooth headphones to watch video on their phones and you would have lots of complaints if there was a obvious desync between the video and audio. This was discussed a lot when apple decided to take the headphone jack away,

The most adamant snobs about latency are gamers and they still use wireless keyboards even though they are concerned by a few extra ms of input delay in their monitor.

The problem likely is going to be if there system to capture the audio is already pushing the limits the bluetooth may be enough to put it over the limit of acceptability. This also depends a lot on the person, some people can detect more than others

 

[Francisco_32]

I do not think the latency will be affected by the signal levels. It should only affect the distance the signal travels. If the signal is damaged the data will just be lost. The newer blue tooth implementations have less delay but I never bothered to look into this.

The delay in general is not going to be huge, people use bluetooth headphones to watch video on their phones and you would have lots of complaints if there was a obvious desync between the video and audio. This was discussed a lot when apple decided to take the headphone jack away,

The most adamant snobs about latency are gamers and they still use wireless keyboards even though they are concerned by a few extra ms of input delay in their monitor.

The problem likely is going to be if there system to capture the audio is already pushing the limits the bluetooth may be enough to put it over the limit of acceptability. This also depends a lot on the person, some people can detect more than others

As you said the level doesn't affect the latency. I'm asking for the BLE not because of the lo energy itself but because of the technical specifications for latency of the BLE that i found on the wikipedia page.
I made the same guess as you regarding of watching videos using bluetooth headphones but then i reed somewhere that in many cases there is a added delay on the video so it would match the audio.
I haven't thought of the gamers before. That's a good point. It's probable that the sensitivity to latency is different while playing games and while playing an instrument, but as you say, those guys have very low tolerance to latency.
I'm guessing i will have to try it and hear it.
Thanks for the answer!