Related issue, not sure exactly why can't I reply to this anymore: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Speakers-and-Displays/Terrible-delay-with-2-nest-audio-pair-w...
I have two Google Nest Audios, paired them in stereo in the Google Home app, and I want to use it as a Bluetooth speaker on my laptop.
However, the latency is pushing 400 ms, which is unusable for gaming or action movies. I tested it with this video.
I also tested my two other Bluetooth devices (JBL Flip 4, Sony XM5), to see if this problem is unique to the Google Nests. With the JBL Flip 4, the latency is around 150 ms, with the XM5 is near zero.
I assume the core of the problem is that when streaming over Bluetooth to a stereo group, the streams are first sent to the primary Nest Audio, which then syncs the playback between the secondary Nest Audio and itself, which causes elevated latency.
Now I see a two potential solutions to the problem from an engineering standpoint:
- Let the individual Nest Audio speakers to be discoverable as separate devices as well, not just as a stereo group in the Google Home app (Stereo pairing I assume is essentially a special, two device only Group, with the L/R channels split between the two devices).
This would allow us to individually pair the devices to our BT audio sources.
This would also let the task of synchronization of the two audio streams to be handled by the BT source, effectively bypassing the synchronization latency issue between the two Nest Audios. - Handle the synchronization of the Nest Audio devices over the Bluetooth protocol, and not over what is currently used.
Bluetooth 5.0 is used in the Nest Audio, and 5.0 already allows connectivity to multiple BT devices, so this shouldn't be an issue. However, only Bluetooth 5.2 seems to support synchronized streams of audios to multiple audio sink devices, see this link, then this link and the multi-stream section.
I'd like to receive either a confirmation if this issue is being prioritized to be on the roadmap of getting fixed in a follow-up software update by the Nest engineering team, or this is a hardware limitation that is not possible to resolve currently with the Nest Audio device I already have two of.
Thank you for your time!
