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Bluetooth headphones seem to add sufficient lag that they prevent me from playing an instrument (like a synth) over them. I'm not sure bluetooth can solve this problem, but I'd be pleased to be surprised.

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Bluetooth builds in some buffering to deal with contention on the airwaves and packet loss while keeping the audio stream going. That buffer is the lag you are hearing. It is quite substantial, and there is a natural tradeoff here - you can use more power to (theoretically) reduce buffer size by improving the SNR of the signal, but if you run out of buffer, you are going to drop samples.

Even USB audio has some buffering to handle bus contention, but it is quite small in comparison.

Some headphones have a low latency mode. On mine it's called "gaming mode": https://i.imgur.com/4h5Oj4S.png

I don't know what changes behind the scenes, but it does improve latency. The only downside I noticed is the reduced range, eg, it stops working on a different room where normal mode still works.

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