Your dub sounds late, and it is probably your headphones

It plays back and you are late on every line. This is the most common technical complaint in anything that records you against a reference, and it is almost never your timing. It is the chain between the game's audio and your mouth.

Where the delay comes from

Sound takes a path: the game sends audio to your headphones, you hear a line, you speak with it, and the microphone sends that back. Every stage adds a little time, and one stage adds a lot.

• —Bluetooth headphones are the big one. The audio you hear is already a couple of hundred milliseconds behind the picture — fine for watching film, ruinous for performance, because you start every line late by the same amount without feeling it at all.
• —A Bluetooth microphone is worse in the same direction: the headset profile trades audio quality and adds delay on the way in as well.
• —Everything else — the browser, the operating system's audio stack, a USB microphone — adds a few milliseconds each. Real, but not what you are hearing.

The fixes that actually work

1. Plug in wired headphones while you record. This removes nearly the whole problem in one move.
2. If the headphones must stay wireless, at least keep the microphone wired or built-in rather than the headset's own.
3. Do not monitor your own voice through software. Hearing yourself delayed is disorienting, it makes the scatter worse, and it fixes nothing.

When it matters, and when it does not

In a private room, never as a number: the room votes, and people forgive a voice that is consistently a beat behind if the take is funny. In ranked, the server measures your timing against the original — and the part worth knowing is that it measures two different things. A constant shift, late by the same amount on every line, is bias, and under about 120 milliseconds it costs nothing at all. What costs is jitter: late here, early there, no two lines agreeing.

Which is the good news buried in the problem. A cheap, consistent delay barely scores against you; an inconsistent one does. The scoring guide has the numbers and the reasons behind them.

The results screen tells you which of the two you were, in words. “Consistently late” is a note about your hardware. “Scattered” is a note about the take.

A ten-second test

Record yourself clapping along with the scene — or with a metronome — and listen back. If every clap lands late by the same amount, that is the chain, and wired headphones will fix it. If the claps wander, that one is practice.

Fix the chain first. It is the only part of timing that money solves outright, and it costs a cable.