A n umber of adaptive algorithms for estimating time di erence between signals received at two spatially separated sensors have been proposed to model the delay using an FIR lter. Among them, there are the LMSTDE, CTDE, ETDE, SETDE and ETDGE, which are computationally e cient because of the LMS implementation. In this paper, these ve m e t h o d s are compared in terms of estimation accuracy and computational complexity. I t i s p r o ved that the LMSTDE and ETDGE attain identical performance for su ciently long lter lengths, although the ETDE and SETDE perform similarly to the ETDGE at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and low SNR, respectively. The CTDE involves minimum computational load but it is the worst estimator in the presence of noise. In addition, optimum realizations of the LMSTDE as well as the ETDE and its variants are derived and their delay v ariances are compared with the Cram er-Rao lower bound. Simulation results show that ETDGE outperforms the other four methods for a wide range of lter lengths at di erent S N R s .