I know it sounds weird, but I have been a drive-in theater fanatic since I was a kid. I live in a town where we have a multi-screen drive-in that runs year-round. I've had problems in the past with things like HD Radio conflicting with the analog FM transmission, so I learned the tricks to work around that (you have to have the FM radio active in order to enter the FM radio settings and disable HD).

But the one thing I cannot fix is a horrible delay that's roughly a full second. My guess is the car's audio system is primarily digital, and analog FM is sampled into a digital signal on input. My guess is not a single engineer at Mercedes even considered a plausible need for low-latency FM. *sigh*

I love almost everything else about the car, with a small wishlist of things I wish they would rip-off from Tesla (dog mode, auto start/stop/lock primarily)

 

What if you buy an FM radio and connect it to the car via aux input or bluetooth audio?

 

I'd first want to see if I can get low latency Bluetooth from my phone. Not all Bluetooth audio formats are low latency. I don't think the EQS has an aux input, though.

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Yeah, AV equipment has long gone digital with most sources being digital, that's not new. The few remaining analog sources such as AM, FM and AUX are just sampled at the input, but internally it's all processed digitally. Speaking of which, have you tried disabling all the post processing effects, such as Surround, 3D, 4D, Focus and whatnot? Those don't come for free and will add latency.

 

Yeah, I thought maybe the post processing might have been the cause and disabled everything that I could - no difference. I am guessing all of the audio goes through the same DSP pipe, no matter what.

So I guess a boombox for the rear seat!