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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

If the speaker did hear you interrupt, then that's actually a latency issue, not a noise/mixing issue.

When a conference call is made up of people all in the same city on decent internet connections, latency is usually not a big issue.

But when a conference call has people from New York, San Francisco, and Japan on it, even if it's only 3 participants, latency can be bad just because of the speed of light, essentially (on top of what is otherwise reasonable hardware/software latency). Latency may be bad even if you're talking with a colleague in the same city, since the audio is "mixed" on the server, and that server might be across the world if a participant from across the world started the meeting. (Counterintuitively, the latency with your local colleague could be twice as bad as with the colleague from across the world.)

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It's not just connection latency, it's decision making latency. As explained in the parent comment, all non-speaking mics are muted. If you want to interrupt, you have to make noise for long enough that it thinks you're talking now, before it will open up your mic. Otherwise it will think it's a cough or innocent tap on the desk.

You're probably right! Though I've just experienced this issue with three participants, all in the same city (not in the US though). It's really annoying.

This is also a problem of people not understanding that audio conferences aren't just a regular conference but with headphones.

There are a few things that most meetings could benefit from. Having an organizer who's aware of the differences between leading an in person meeting and a remote meeting, cutting video to save bandwidth if the meeting doesn't absolutely need it (the organizer can usually just disable the function), muting when you're not speaking (by far the best quality of life improvement, can be done silently by the organizer if someone is just doing their Vader impersonation throughout the meeting), using the "raise hand" function (again, the organizer plays a huge role here), using the native app instead of the web one usually provides better quality and performance, using a wired connection instead of wireless if possible, sometimes even starting meetings at non-standard hours (like 15 to/past the hour) helps avoid the rush of people logging in at the same time, etc.

I’ve experienced some pretty horrific latency in Google Meet that seemed to originate from my local device, where only my connection would suffer from high latency.

Typical restart-all-the-things usually made it go away. But it wasn’t unusual for 500ms of latency to slowly build up during a 30min call. Unfortunately I have nothing more useful to add, the issue resolved itself before I could track down a definitive cause.

Bluetooth.

Stop using it.

Without even looking at your setup, I would bet $100 minimum that it's Bluetooth latency. It adds a lot of latency, 500ms is not unusual, and many folks have no idea that all that latency is really just the last 18 inches. This is why you're seeing more and more cases where people are using good old iPhone wired earphone for conference calling, especially when skyping a TV interview.

> It adds a lot of latency, 500ms is not unusual…

How are you measuring? Half that is considered high-end from what I'm reading[1], and AirPods Pro apparently reduce that to 150ms.

[1] https://stephencoyle.net/airpods-pro

150ms is terrible. That's more time than going from London to Los Angeles and back.

Bluetooth definitely is the issue with 95% of these latency issues.

Also, video makes it 10-70 ms worse due to frame-buffering and significantly worse codec latency. If you're within 2-3h by car, try ethernet cables and Mumble/"Jitsii Meet", the former at a low-latency star point (locally, if you have to) and the latter in P2P mode. 30ms end2end is possible, but 50ms end2end is quite realistic if you have good internet routing. Inside a city even 10ms could be possible, but that'd need some ultra-low-latency software, no Coax/DSL (Ethernet-based FTTH should do), and a kinda-exotic low-latency soundcards, because Opus alone eats 5ms one-way in the restricted-celt-only-low-latency mode. This is basically the delay of sharing a round meeting table for ~20 persons.

150ms * 2 in many cases, as both parties use a bluetooth headset. Wifi adds another 5-50ms * 2 plus some packet drops.

Oh my god, I had no idea airpods were so bad.

Crazy that airpods have that much latency. I have bluetooth in the car and it has way too much latency - I thought Apple had improved it to not be noticeable but I never checked the numbers.

Incidentally, for playing midi instruments you generally want things to be below 8ms to feel natural. 150ms is an eternity.

Is the lipsync ok if you watch a video on an iphone with airpods?

> Is the lipsync ok if you watch a video on an iphone with AirPods?

For video they compensate for the latency by displaying the visuals slightly delayed (this has been done for over a decade even way back on feature phones).

Even game consoles have the option to do this since some TVs/receivers have audio or video latency.

Shure PGX-D is a prosumer / church-basement level of digital wireless microphone system, and that's 3.5ms.

I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately I was seeing this then using the laptops built in speakers, not just with Bluetooth headphones.

You can check your WiFi and try with an ethernet cable. Wifi has tendency to add unpredictable latency.

This applies to everyone on the call

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