Most video platforms have a "latency floor" of 200 ms to 500 ms — fine for a meeting, but impossible for a metronome.
In the demo below, we put Lyrekos to the ultimate stress test: four performers singing "Happy Birthday" across six different time zones.
- 0:13 — The Standard Experience: Notice how the audio layers drift and cancel each other out on Zoom.
- 0:33 — The Lyrekos Difference: Watch the synchronization lock in — under 20 ms.
The singing? Real people singing poorly but having fun. The timing? Frame-accurate synchronization.
Want to try it yourself?
Lyrekos is currently in early access. Join our waitlist to be among the first to experience synchronized remote music performance.
Join the WaitlistTech Notes
You can't blame Zoom for this — or Teams or Meet, for that matter. They were purpose-built for conversation, not music. Speech codecs are designed to suppress background noise, normalize volume, and tolerate latency — exactly the wrong things for singing together. Lyrekos is purpose-built for collaborative music across the internet.
A few details on what you're hearing in the demo:
For the Zoom recording, we used the "Original Sound" option, which disables some of Zoom's audio processing. Even with that, the latency drift makes synchronized singing impossible.
For Lyrekos, we encode audio using Opus at 48 kHz with all browser audio processing disabled — no echo cancellation, no noise suppression, no automatic gain control. We want the rawest signal your microphone can deliver.
One more thing to watch for: there is no lip sync correction on the Lyrekos video clips in this demo. What you're seeing is the raw, unshifted video alongside the synchronized audio. This actually makes the Lyrekos result more impressive — the audio is locked in even though we haven't yet aligned the video to match. Lip sync is coming in a future update.
Curious about why we built this? Read our origin story. For a deeper look at how Lyrekos fits into music education, see Teaching Music Online.
Lance Glasser
Lance is CEO and Co-founder of Kinetic Audio Innovations. He was previously a faculty member at MIT, Director of Electronics Technology at DARPA, and CTO at KLA. He also makes sculpture, which has nothing to do with audio but explains the hundreds of pounds of bronze in his house.