One of things that I hate the most about the fact that we are all using wireless earbuds instead of wired earphones is the latency: it is bad, getting up to seconds(!) depending on your particular combination of OS/earbuds/device.
There is a solution though: Bluetooth LE Audio, that is supposed to fix multiple issues with the original design for Bluetooth Classic Audio, including a much lower latency, improved efficiency (e.g.: less battery power) and even multiple streams of audio. LE Audio also includes a new default codec for improved audio quality, LC3, that replaces the venerable SBC codec for audio.
However, the standard is a mess right now: a few wireless headphones already support it, but they're generally disabled by default and it is pretty messy to enable. And even after enabling it, getting it to work can be a pain.
I have pretty much the best setup to use LE Audio right now: a recently released Pixel 9 Pro with Sony's WF-1000XM5 earbuds, and after lots of tries I got it to work. You can see below the versions of everything I am using:
- Android: 14
- Sound Connect: 11.0.1
- WM-1000XM5: 4.0.2
The first thing you need to do is enable in "Sound Connect" app "LE Audio Priority" in "Device Settings -> System":
After this, you will need to pair your headset with the device again. You can do this as same as always: press and hold the button in case for a few seconds until a blue light starts to blink. However, this is where things starts to get janky: I couldn't get the headset to pair with Android again.
A few of the things that I needed to do (in no specific order):
- Remove the previous paired headset
- Restart the Android
- Clean-up "Sound Connect" storage (Long press the app icon -> "App info" -> "Storage and Cache" -> "Clear storage")
If you can get the headset to connect, go to the "Bluetooth" settings in Android, click in the gear icon for the headset and enable "LE Audio" option:
If you can't, you may want to restore the headset to factory settings and try again from the start (that means pairing your device with "Sound Connect" again, and you may want to try to clear the storage before doing so).
Yes, the process is extremely janky, but I think this is why both "Sound Connect" and Android marks this feature as beta/experimental. And I still need to test the latency, but from my initial testing there are some glitches when the audio is only used for a short period of time (e.g.: Duolingo only enables the audio when the character is speaking). So I only recommend this if you want to test how LE Audio will behave, since it is clear that this needs more polish.