> thinking with sound is exactly how we ended up here

While everything you said is true, the speed of sound, which, yes, is much slower than light, is still pretty damn fast when we're talking about how much time there is to process something in the time between a soundwave passing from one side of your earbud to the other. Right? Cuz that's what we're talking about. Not how long the sound of something vs. the light of something takes to hit your brain.

Ultimately what we're talking about is that the earbud needs to be able to detect the soundwave, compute its opposite waveform, and emit the counter wave all in the same time that it takes for the soundwave to pass the earbud so that the original wave and the counterwave hit the eardrum at the same time. Right?

So if we assume the earbud is maybe half an inch thick, means it has to do all of that in about 1/27,000th of a second. 0.04 milliseconds.

Even knowing how fast sound travels, that ability to process seems unintuitively quick. That's all I'm saying, it's unintuitive and pretty darn cool.