It is intrinsically better though. Wired sound infinitely nicer sounding, and with much lower latency. Will we ever have a day when wireless will be sufficiently low latency?
I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that it is intrinsically better when both of the things you mention are tradeoffs you make, one of which isn't really true and the other which is an engineering issue.
> Wired sound infinitely nicer sounding
There are good sounding wireless headphones and terrible sounding wired headphones. The drawbacks is that with wireless headphones you can't control the sound stack and are dependent on the manufacturer to provide high quality drivers, amplification,
and digital to analog conversion all built into the device.
> much lower latency
...is an engineering problem.
> Will we ever have a day when wireless will be sufficiently low latency?
A company already markets their wireless headphones directly to musicians, which is basically the threshold of low latency you need to meet; realtime monitoring [1]. Does it accomplish what it set out to do? Not sure, but seems like it's good enough for some people.
Ultimately it comes down to exactly what I said, which is that there are tradeoffs to using wired vs. wireless headphones and one is not intrinsically better than the other. You thinking that something sounds "infinitely better" doesn't make the rest of those tradeoffs not meaningful to other people.
There are some headsets (such as Audeze Penrose) that use 2,4GHz wireless instead of Bluetooth. Penrose's latency is reported to be 16ms. At least for games, that's good enough and noticeably better than anything over BT I've tested.
Of course, it has the dongle issue which limits the usage to certain devices (Xbox and Windows in my case, I haven't tested the dongle on my Mac or Linux).
The flow of electrons in a copper wire is much slower than a wireless or fiber optic signal, so over longer distances, theoretically it could be lower latency. I suppose the challenge is in building a fast enough encoder/decoder and dealing with interference
> The flow of electrons in a copper wire is much slower than a wireless or fiber optic signal, so over longer distances, theoretically it could be lower latency
"flow of electrons in a copper wire" has little to do with the speed of a signal transmitted via electrons in a copper wire - what we care about here is propogation delay[1]. Assuming that the speed is about c in air (a bit less but whatever) and at least 0.6c in copper, and assuming a minimum threshold of say 1ms of delay being noticeable to an audiophile, then you would need a headphone cable about 450km in length to noticed the difference.
