If you're sitting 5 meters from your speakers, you add about 15 ms of latency and, in some cases, people all the way across the globe will hear your sound before you hear it yourself.

It's pretty wild to think about. My dad used to point out to me that, if I was watching a live concert on the TV, the sound would reach me before it reached much of the live audience.

This.

I found that most of the latency in networked audio applications, when jamming within 800 km within domestic internet, mostly comes from (a) a large network buffer (to prevent sound stutter when the network isn’t reliable, e.g. due to wi-fi interference) and (b) extra audio processing on top (echo cancellation, noise suppression), and not the limitation of light speed.

> in some cases, people all the way across the globe will hear your sound before you hear it yourself.

You're vastly exaggerating. FTL communication is not here yet.

The theoretical limit for half the planet is ~67ms, in practice it's north of 100ms for Jamulus (plus the additional delay of a user's sound reproduction system).

FTS, not FTL.

I believe the example above is more about sound speed than light speed.

I experienced concerts in stadiums, in the back rows, where the distance from the stage makes the sounds arrive noticeably later than the visuals.

The delay is really perceptible, and disturbing, to a point.

A TV audience would not suffer from it (assuming a live broadcast, with negligible broadcast latency, for the example to make sense).

In case it wasn't clear, parent commenter probably means "don't use bluetooth headphones." There's no latency for wired headphones.

Apt-X "low latency" is 33ms - the equivalent of being about 11m away from the sound source.

Standard Apt-X is 100ms, or equivalent to 33m distance in open air.

SBC codec is 200ms.

Then there's the buffering headphone bluetooth chipsets may do to avoid customers complaining about clicking/popping. If you're on a crowded subway train there can be a shitload of bluetooth traffic bouncing around, in which case having a healthy buffer is helpful.

USB soundcards were so featureful compared to onboard or even the pci stuff when they came out, like the sound blaster extigy. I liked positional audio and all of the spdif and toslinks. However, it, by itself, even with ASIO had latency up around 30-50ms.

I have an external "headphone out and 2 microphone in" USB interface now, and it's latency is still in the 5-15ms range, so I use onboard to write and headphones to master. At one point I bought a macbook air and a FireWire interface, but the screen was no good and the single FireWire interface tied my hands. I also have a few pci cards that I've been collecting parts for, like an m-audio 8x8 interface, there's a box that connects to the back of the soundcard with some 30-40 pin d-sub. I finally got all 5 or 6 parts and don't really have a computer to put it in anymore! I wanted that card for around 10 years by the time I found all of it...

I'm assuming anything midi-ish can just use quantization and only the player will notice, the final mix should sound ok.