Bluetooth IEM’s? Latency?

[cassdad]

Investigating potential in-ear-monitors (IEMs) for use for myself to hear my keyboard in a very loud band on-stage environment.

 

I came across a cheap pair of BLUETOOTH earphones, where at the end of the product description, there was a “Note” to the effect:  “Not for use for musical instruments due to a 40ms latency”.   (A 40 ms delay from key press to ear sound would drive me nuts.)

 

Further searching shows that almost all “in-ear-monitors” for musician instrument use were wired and referred to as IEM, whereas mostly those using bluetooth (5.2, whatever that is) were referred to as “earphones” or “ear buds”.

 

Which begs the question:  Does BLUETOOTH have an inherent processing latency making them not suitable for use with say, playing a piano?  I would expect wired IEMs to have zero latency, pretty closely followed by those getting a signal via radio waves (like those frequencies used for professional wireless microphones).

 

Any personal thoughts / experiences / knowledge to share?

[analogika]

Yes, the newest Bluetooth codecs have a best-case latency of 20-40 ms. 
 

Older codecs are in the hundreds of ms. 
 

My understanding is that this is due to the transcoding at either end, and buffering on the receiver. 

[Stokely]

oof, 20-40.

I can't even get my consumer earbuds to pair reliably, I have had loads of bluetooth issues over the years.  I just run wired, either with ethernet (when using ultranet with a behringer p16m) or line signal aux into my Rolls headphone amp.  Both are on a pedalboard so it's easy to connect up.

[cphollis]

The only things I'm using bluetooth for in my rigs are (1) midi program change information for lights, and (2) streaming break music.  Neither is latency sensitive.