TL;DR
Unless your HDTV setup involves an AV receiver, there's a pretty decent chance you have audio lag (audio plays XXms after the video). While not as terrible as input lag, audio lag is still a problem that's fairly widespread and which negatively affects the video game experience. This thread is a place to discuss, detect, and hopefully correct audio lag.
What's this thread for?
I made this thread because I recently discovered 125ms of audio lag in my HDTV setup. This was pretty surprising, because I hadn't noticed just how much audio lag I had until after I measured it with Stepmania and Rock Band. I then realized that there are likely many other GAFfers who have audio lag but don't know about it. So to help all of you out there with laggy audio, I decided to make this thread.
This OP is a WIP. If you have anything you'd like me to add, feel free to post it.
Disclaimer
I am not a professional AV person. I'm just a guy who likes video games and who also likes tinkering with this kind of technical stuff. I am not responsible if something breaks on your end after you've read this thread.
What is Audio Lag? (and other definitions for this thread).
Audio Lag, in the context of this thread, refers to when the game audio is out of sync with the game video such that the audio plays after the video.
Audio Latency, in contrast to Audio Lag, refers to the time between when audio is sent from the PC/console and when the audio plays from the speakers.
Display Latency, aka Input Lag, refers to the time between when video is set from the PC/console and when the video is displayed on the TV.
Audio Lag = Audio Latency – Input Lag. A perfectly in-sync display will have zero audio lag.
Note that getting zero audio lag is really hard without professional equipment. For one thing, the speed of sound plays a role; one foot adds 1ms of audio latency. Plus, the human brain is too good at tolerating a lot of audio desync.
Negative audio lag is the opposite problem; the audio plays before the video. This can happen if you connect low-latency speakers directly to your PC/console and use an HDTV with high input lag.
Why should I care about audio lag?
It puts you at a competitive disadvantage. The player who hears a gunshot 50-100ms earlier than you has 50-100ms more time to react than you.
It messes up rhythm games and requires them to be calibrated. Uncalibrated rhythm games are difficult or impossible to play, and calibration is a pain.
It's just wrong. Audio and video are meant to be in sync; out of sync audio and video is just simply wrong.
My gaming setup has zero audio lag, what are you talking about?
You don't know that. The brain is pretty good at tolerating really out-of-sync audio. You could have 100ms of audio lag and not realize it. Imagine if you had 100ms of input lag.
Some HDTVs have inherent unfixable audio lag. This is the case with my Vizio TV; 60ms of audio lag.
Some HDTVs have correct audio sync in Standard mode but have audio lag in Game/PC mode, perhaps because the TV is cheating and reducing display latency without reducing the audio latency. This was the case with a friend's Samsung TV, and it made playing Rhythm Heaven Fever much harder than it should've been.
Some soundbars have quite a bit of inherent audio latency. This is the case with my JBL soundbar; 65ms latency.
Some HDTVs/soundbars have increased audio lag when processing surround sound (e.g. Dolby 5.1) vs stereo PCM. An older LG TV I've used had really bad audio lag with Dolby 5.1, and my JBL soundbar's audio latency increases roughly 40ms (~105ms total) when processing Dolby 5.1.
If you connected a soundbar to your HDTV's optical/ARC out, you might be adding the HDTV's audio latency to the soundbar's audio latency. This is what happened to me, and I ended up with 125ms of total audio lag.
If you connected headphones or speakers directly to your console, then depending on the input lag of your display you might have negative audio lag.
I am curious what the audio lag/latency is for the PS4/XBO controller's headphone jacks. Obviously it's pretty good since no one's complained about it, haha.
If you have an AV Receiver, congrats. A good receiver lets you manually adjust the latency to sync it with your HDTV. However, if your receiver has higher audio latency than your display's input lag, then you will have uncorrectable audio lag.
How can I tell if I have audio lag?
Noticing audio lag in your gaming setup is pretty hard.
First, we need to calibrate your brain. Get some wired headphones and watch this audio sync video on a device that should be in-sync, such as a laptop. The beeps should play exactly when the sine waves flash; if the beeps play after the waves disappear (or before the waves appear), your device has out-of-sync audio/video.
Now, play the video on your TV using your console (PC/chromecast/etc) and take note of which HDMI port is being used. Again, the beeps should play exactly when the sine waves flash; if the beeps play after the waves disappear, you have audio lag.
Remember, noticing this stuff is pretty hard. That being said, if you really didn't notice any audio lag, then congrats, you're (probably) good to go. If you noticed audio lag, welp.
Can I measure audio lag?
Easiest way to measure audio lag is to get a rhythm game like Rock Band and perform the calibration. However, if you weren't able to notice audio lag in the audio sync video, you might not notice it in the calibration either.
Stepmania is a free DDR clone for PC and it also has an audio sync calibration (Options > Input Options > Calibrate Audio Sync), but it has trouble with very high audio latencies. You have to open %APPDATA%\Stepmania\Save\Preferences.ini and edit GlobalOffsetSeconds to -0.050, -0.100, or even -0.150 until the game actually cooperates, but when it does it works quite well, and as a bonus you get to play Stepmania!
There might be other free games with good audio sync calibrators; if you know of any, please post them and I'll add them to the OP.
If you know how to use Audacity and have a laptop, you can measure audio latency more accurately (within 10ms). This is how I obtained my audio latency numbers.
Follow the directions on this page but make two recordings: one with your TV's speakers, and one with your laptop's speakers (laptop speakers should have zero latency). The timestamp difference between the pulses of each recording is your TV's audio latency. If you know your TV's input lag, subtract the input lag to get your audio lag.
If you'd like me to post a more detailed procedure, let me know and I'll make another post.
How much audio lag is actually bad?
It's a little subjective. Imo, anything above 100ms is bad, regardless of whether you can notice it or not. 50ms is ok. 30ms or less is pretty good. Remember, getting perfect audio sync is really hard without professional equipment. so it's ok to be off by a couple ms or so.
How do I fix audio lag?
If you have a quality AV receiver or a magical HDTV with an audio lag/lip sync control that lets you decrease (instead of increase) the audio lag, then congrats, the fix is easy. Otherwise, you're probably going to have to spend money.
In all audio lag cases, the best fix is to get an AV receiver with lip sync controls, but that's expensive.
If you have an HDTV with inherent audio lag, you're going to need to get external speakers or a soundbar. As mentioned above, an AV receiver will solve everything, but it's expensive. Plain external speakers without lip sync controls, such as PC speakers, tend to have zero audio latency and thus you'll likely have negative audio lag. A soundbar is a decent choice, but that often has its own audio lag issues.
If you have a soundbar that connected to your TV with optical/ARC, see what happens when you connect your game consoles directly to the soundbar. Chances are you'll decrease audio lag significantly. If you have enough HDMI ports on your soundbar, try to connect all your stuff to the soundbar; otherwise you'll need to get an HDMI switch. I don't have a 4K TV or 4K equipment and I needed an optical out, so I got this ViewHD 3x1 HDMI switch, and it's awesome. Zero added latency audio/video latency (confirmed with Rock Band and Audacity), and the ARC support is a nice bonus for OTA TV. Of course, if you don't want to mess with this stuff, you can always get an AV receiver.
If you have low-latency headphones/speakers connected directly to your console and you're experiencing negative audio lag, try connecting your headphones/speakers to your TV instead. Or get a TV/monitor with lower input lag. Or get an AV receiver.
What causes audio lag? Why is audio lag even a thing?
Some people believe that the HDMI standard is an inherent source of audio latency; this is false. I have an ASUS PC monitor with built-in speakers and an HDMI input, and it has 1ms (yes, one millisecond) of audio latency. All audio latency comes from processing delays in your equipment; changing your HDMI/optical cables will not reduce your audio latency.
As for why audio lag is a thing, I have no idea. Audio processing is extremely cheap, and yet every year HDTVs and soundbars ship with inherent and insufficiently configurable audio latency. At the same time, people just have a hard time noticing audio lag in general, so no one does anything about it.
Cool stuff. Now what are we supposed to talk about in this thread?
I was thinking this thread would be primarily a troubleshooting thread; people come in asking for help finding and correcting audio lag, and other people offer the help. It's also a place for people to complain about the audio lag in their hardware.
Speaking of the latter, another idea I had was to collectively post the audio latency numbers from our hardware. I'll start:
All audio latency numbers are (probably) within 10ms of their true value.
TV: Vizio D50-D1 (Vizio 1080p D-series 2016)
HDMI 1 Input Lag (Standard Mode): 26.5ms (measured by Rtings)
HDMI 1 Input Lag (Game Mode): 26.5ms (measured by Rtings)
HDMI 1 Audio Latency (Standard Mode): ~86ms (~60ms audio lag) (measured with Audacity)
HDMI 1 Audio Latency (Game Mode): ~86ms (~60ms audio lag) (measured with Audacity)
HDMI 2 and 3 have identical display and audio latency to HDMI 1.
Soundbar: JBL Cinema SB250
Optical Input PCM: ~62ms (measured with Audacity)
Optical Input Dolby: ~105ms (measured with Rock Band)
Analog Input: ~62ms (measured with Audacity)
Bluetooth: ~283ms (measured with Audacity)
Unless your HDTV setup involves an AV receiver, there's a pretty decent chance you have audio lag (audio plays XXms after the video). While not as terrible as input lag, audio lag is still a problem that's fairly widespread and which negatively affects the video game experience. This thread is a place to discuss, detect, and hopefully correct audio lag.
What's this thread for?
I made this thread because I recently discovered 125ms of audio lag in my HDTV setup. This was pretty surprising, because I hadn't noticed just how much audio lag I had until after I measured it with Stepmania and Rock Band. I then realized that there are likely many other GAFfers who have audio lag but don't know about it. So to help all of you out there with laggy audio, I decided to make this thread.
This OP is a WIP. If you have anything you'd like me to add, feel free to post it.
Disclaimer
I am not a professional AV person. I'm just a guy who likes video games and who also likes tinkering with this kind of technical stuff. I am not responsible if something breaks on your end after you've read this thread.
What is Audio Lag? (and other definitions for this thread).
Audio Lag, in the context of this thread, refers to when the game audio is out of sync with the game video such that the audio plays after the video.
Audio Latency, in contrast to Audio Lag, refers to the time between when audio is sent from the PC/console and when the audio plays from the speakers.
Display Latency, aka Input Lag, refers to the time between when video is set from the PC/console and when the video is displayed on the TV.
Audio Lag = Audio Latency – Input Lag. A perfectly in-sync display will have zero audio lag.
Note that getting zero audio lag is really hard without professional equipment. For one thing, the speed of sound plays a role; one foot adds 1ms of audio latency. Plus, the human brain is too good at tolerating a lot of audio desync.
Negative audio lag is the opposite problem; the audio plays before the video. This can happen if you connect low-latency speakers directly to your PC/console and use an HDTV with high input lag.
Why should I care about audio lag?
It puts you at a competitive disadvantage. The player who hears a gunshot 50-100ms earlier than you has 50-100ms more time to react than you.
It messes up rhythm games and requires them to be calibrated. Uncalibrated rhythm games are difficult or impossible to play, and calibration is a pain.
It's just wrong. Audio and video are meant to be in sync; out of sync audio and video is just simply wrong.
My gaming setup has zero audio lag, what are you talking about?
You don't know that. The brain is pretty good at tolerating really out-of-sync audio. You could have 100ms of audio lag and not realize it. Imagine if you had 100ms of input lag.
Some HDTVs have inherent unfixable audio lag. This is the case with my Vizio TV; 60ms of audio lag.
Some HDTVs have correct audio sync in Standard mode but have audio lag in Game/PC mode, perhaps because the TV is cheating and reducing display latency without reducing the audio latency. This was the case with a friend's Samsung TV, and it made playing Rhythm Heaven Fever much harder than it should've been.
Some soundbars have quite a bit of inherent audio latency. This is the case with my JBL soundbar; 65ms latency.
Some HDTVs/soundbars have increased audio lag when processing surround sound (e.g. Dolby 5.1) vs stereo PCM. An older LG TV I've used had really bad audio lag with Dolby 5.1, and my JBL soundbar's audio latency increases roughly 40ms (~105ms total) when processing Dolby 5.1.
If you connected a soundbar to your HDTV's optical/ARC out, you might be adding the HDTV's audio latency to the soundbar's audio latency. This is what happened to me, and I ended up with 125ms of total audio lag.
If you connected headphones or speakers directly to your console, then depending on the input lag of your display you might have negative audio lag.
I am curious what the audio lag/latency is for the PS4/XBO controller's headphone jacks. Obviously it's pretty good since no one's complained about it, haha.
If you have an AV Receiver, congrats. A good receiver lets you manually adjust the latency to sync it with your HDTV. However, if your receiver has higher audio latency than your display's input lag, then you will have uncorrectable audio lag.
How can I tell if I have audio lag?
Noticing audio lag in your gaming setup is pretty hard.
First, we need to calibrate your brain. Get some wired headphones and watch this audio sync video on a device that should be in-sync, such as a laptop. The beeps should play exactly when the sine waves flash; if the beeps play after the waves disappear (or before the waves appear), your device has out-of-sync audio/video.
Now, play the video on your TV using your console (PC/chromecast/etc) and take note of which HDMI port is being used. Again, the beeps should play exactly when the sine waves flash; if the beeps play after the waves disappear, you have audio lag.
Remember, noticing this stuff is pretty hard. That being said, if you really didn't notice any audio lag, then congrats, you're (probably) good to go. If you noticed audio lag, welp.
Can I measure audio lag?
Easiest way to measure audio lag is to get a rhythm game like Rock Band and perform the calibration. However, if you weren't able to notice audio lag in the audio sync video, you might not notice it in the calibration either.
Stepmania is a free DDR clone for PC and it also has an audio sync calibration (Options > Input Options > Calibrate Audio Sync), but it has trouble with very high audio latencies. You have to open %APPDATA%\Stepmania\Save\Preferences.ini and edit GlobalOffsetSeconds to -0.050, -0.100, or even -0.150 until the game actually cooperates, but when it does it works quite well, and as a bonus you get to play Stepmania!
There might be other free games with good audio sync calibrators; if you know of any, please post them and I'll add them to the OP.
If you know how to use Audacity and have a laptop, you can measure audio latency more accurately (within 10ms). This is how I obtained my audio latency numbers.
Follow the directions on this page but make two recordings: one with your TV's speakers, and one with your laptop's speakers (laptop speakers should have zero latency). The timestamp difference between the pulses of each recording is your TV's audio latency. If you know your TV's input lag, subtract the input lag to get your audio lag.
If you'd like me to post a more detailed procedure, let me know and I'll make another post.
How much audio lag is actually bad?
It's a little subjective. Imo, anything above 100ms is bad, regardless of whether you can notice it or not. 50ms is ok. 30ms or less is pretty good. Remember, getting perfect audio sync is really hard without professional equipment. so it's ok to be off by a couple ms or so.
How do I fix audio lag?
If you have a quality AV receiver or a magical HDTV with an audio lag/lip sync control that lets you decrease (instead of increase) the audio lag, then congrats, the fix is easy. Otherwise, you're probably going to have to spend money.
In all audio lag cases, the best fix is to get an AV receiver with lip sync controls, but that's expensive.
If you have an HDTV with inherent audio lag, you're going to need to get external speakers or a soundbar. As mentioned above, an AV receiver will solve everything, but it's expensive. Plain external speakers without lip sync controls, such as PC speakers, tend to have zero audio latency and thus you'll likely have negative audio lag. A soundbar is a decent choice, but that often has its own audio lag issues.
If you have a soundbar that connected to your TV with optical/ARC, see what happens when you connect your game consoles directly to the soundbar. Chances are you'll decrease audio lag significantly. If you have enough HDMI ports on your soundbar, try to connect all your stuff to the soundbar; otherwise you'll need to get an HDMI switch. I don't have a 4K TV or 4K equipment and I needed an optical out, so I got this ViewHD 3x1 HDMI switch, and it's awesome. Zero added latency audio/video latency (confirmed with Rock Band and Audacity), and the ARC support is a nice bonus for OTA TV. Of course, if you don't want to mess with this stuff, you can always get an AV receiver.
If you have low-latency headphones/speakers connected directly to your console and you're experiencing negative audio lag, try connecting your headphones/speakers to your TV instead. Or get a TV/monitor with lower input lag. Or get an AV receiver.
What causes audio lag? Why is audio lag even a thing?
Some people believe that the HDMI standard is an inherent source of audio latency; this is false. I have an ASUS PC monitor with built-in speakers and an HDMI input, and it has 1ms (yes, one millisecond) of audio latency. All audio latency comes from processing delays in your equipment; changing your HDMI/optical cables will not reduce your audio latency.
As for why audio lag is a thing, I have no idea. Audio processing is extremely cheap, and yet every year HDTVs and soundbars ship with inherent and insufficiently configurable audio latency. At the same time, people just have a hard time noticing audio lag in general, so no one does anything about it.
Cool stuff. Now what are we supposed to talk about in this thread?
I was thinking this thread would be primarily a troubleshooting thread; people come in asking for help finding and correcting audio lag, and other people offer the help. It's also a place for people to complain about the audio lag in their hardware.
Speaking of the latter, another idea I had was to collectively post the audio latency numbers from our hardware. I'll start:
All audio latency numbers are (probably) within 10ms of their true value.
TV: Vizio D50-D1 (Vizio 1080p D-series 2016)
HDMI 1 Input Lag (Standard Mode): 26.5ms (measured by Rtings)
HDMI 1 Input Lag (Game Mode): 26.5ms (measured by Rtings)
HDMI 1 Audio Latency (Standard Mode): ~86ms (~60ms audio lag) (measured with Audacity)
HDMI 1 Audio Latency (Game Mode): ~86ms (~60ms audio lag) (measured with Audacity)
HDMI 2 and 3 have identical display and audio latency to HDMI 1.
Soundbar: JBL Cinema SB250
Optical Input PCM: ~62ms (measured with Audacity)
Optical Input Dolby: ~105ms (measured with Rock Band)
Analog Input: ~62ms (measured with Audacity)
Bluetooth: ~283ms (measured with Audacity)