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Fuckin’ what? Is this meme 10 years old or what?
I have Sony xm 3 headphones and I can’t game on them because everything is delayed like 100ms
Bluetooth is a terrible standard for gaming. You’d want something with its own dedicated 2.4ghz dongle.
Couldn’t believe it at first and thought mine was a defective pair. The delay is atrocious
It’s because Bluetooth is primarily designed for low power usage.
Yep, but as someone pointed out those were $300 at launch. I know they’re not meant for gaming and reading about latency issues seems like a 1st world problem to me because my older Bluetooth headset had lower latency.
Come to think of it, I don’t even remember which pair they were but it would’ve been under $100 with some BT dac maybe
That’s not a gaming headphone. A proper gaming headphone have near zero latency, you can even play rhythm games with it. Usually it will come with it’s own wireless dongle and doesn’t use Bluetooth at all.
Aren’t those supposed to be like, 300$ headphones at launch? I
Gaming is the far from what they were designed for. When listening to music or whatever you couldn’t care less about a delay.
Next time buy headphones with AptX low latency support.
I bought headphones with aptxLL, only to find out that newer Qualcomm chipsets have depricared it in favor of aptx adaptive. It’s not backward compatible and at the time there wasn’t a single adaptive set of headphones on the market. I would either have to buy a >4 year old phone or get a new pair of overpriced headphones to use it now.
Deprecated doesn’t mean it’s not supported. But it might be disabled by your phone manufacturer because they decided to cheap out.
Sure would be cool if Windows supported anything but AAC and SBC though…
Windows has full support for AptX since forever.
From what I’ve seen this isn’t true. Search for “Windows AptX LL” and you’ll see dozens of ways you might install drivers that add support. The most common advice seems to be to buy a dongle that supports it.
All my laptops and PCs support AptX out of the box without any 3rd party stuff. There can be exceptions, sure, but I haven’t seen them myself.
Huh, must be my hardware then. It is getting kinda old…
When my PC didn’t have built-in Bluetooth stack, I was using ASUS single. It’s cheap and works just fine with my headphones without any noticeable latency. And there’s definitely a huge difference when I try to use my Bose 700 which don’t support shit.
I have xm4 and have absolutely 0 problems with it. I feel like unless you’re an actual pro gamer or a sweaty elitist it makes no difference.
I have xm4 and I’m not an elitist.
The latency is ridiculous, no good for gaming but amazing for everything else.
I have XM4s too and dont notice it at all.
I have G533 which are even discontinued from production, they have no real latency.
I’ll never understand wireless keyboards. They just sit on the desk? Why go through the hassle of charging it?
I hate wires in general. Everything that can be wireless IS wireless at my home.
This sounds like absolute hell.
Yes, wires are hell.
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I have a seperate wireless gaming keyboard for couch gaming in front of my tv. It has a purpose
You can use the Keyboards cable to charge your phone, when that s full you can go back charging and using the keyboard with cable.
yeah it’s crazy wireless headphones are the bad one here
as someone whos had wireless keyboards its not any better than a wired keyboard aside from it can die. so its kinda like a tomagotchi pet if youre into that
Even though my keyboard stays on my desk most the time, I have had wireless ones for years now because it’s much much much more convenient to be able to just pick it up and move it wherever or off my desk entirely when I need space in front of me (for projects, eating, etc). Yeah I have to charge it once every few weeks overnight when I’m not using it but considering my desk is also my only workspace for electronics and Lego and other hobbies, because I live in a small apartment, it’s a wonderful solution. Bonus that the cable which gets tucked away nicely can be used to charge several other things I keep on my desk / use all the time.
I got a wired/wireless BT hybrid with a detachable usb-c connection. For times I’m at my desk, like for work or realtime/action games, I have it plugged in. When I want to watch movies/shows or play a more casual/slower-paced game, I enjoy the option to take the keyboard farther away from the screen. The AAA rechargeable batteries in it are supposed to last a month of near continuous use, but I’ve never let them go uncharged for long enough to test that.
For me, it’s about prioritizing performance vs convenience/comfortability for the different use cases.
Cause it looks pretty and mine has 3 bt devices that I can switch between and its quite nice. Hoping to switch to a bt mouse as well once mine completely dies.
But BT suuuuucks
It’s perfectly fine for me. I press a key and its there on screen. The latency is hardly noticeable and doesn’t hamper me in any meaningful way.
There’s the latency, and there’s also the unreliable connection, it’s just not as stable as the mice with dedicated dongles. And it’s more vulnerable to interference. Battery life is FAR superior on Bluetooth, though; that’s the main upside.
As said latency wasn’t an issue for me, bluetooth connection is super stable at least on linux, have never noticed interference so far. What was the keyboard did u use?
Latency and stability are different things. Latency is how long keystrokes or mouse movement take to get to your computer. Instability would manifest as INCORRECT or entirely missed keystrokes or mouse movements. Bluetooth is also more vulnerable to interference from things like microwaves, another thing that might cause instability.
Bluetooth keyboards (usually Logitech) have worked okay for me in the past, but they don’t always reliably wake up from sleep and connect quickly when I try to use them. Bluetooth mice are a bigger concern to me, they feel noticed slower and my mouse makes jerky movements. You’ll notice that nearly all gaming mice have a dongle so that you can avoid Bluetooth.
Mate I use a bt kb I obviously know the difference what I said was those issues you mentioned isnt an issue for me. Latency is not noticeable AND it’s stable. I don’t have an microwave next to my pc and other bluetooth devices and wifi doesn’t seem to be an issue either. Mine can be configured to completely disable sleep as well and has 3750 mah so it won’t die easily. I am using fairly new rk84 atm, even if any of the issues develops in the future I can just switch to 2.4 or wired anyway.
Cables are ugly
You clearly haven’t used wireless headphones in last 10 years, have you?
If you use the gamingest headphones with proprietary dongles, you can get decent latency. But then you’re sacrificing on sound quality or ANC, and if you have multiple devices you want to use them with (eg a console and a PC), you have to either physically move the dongle between them, or suffer with Bluetooth lag and connection hassles on one of them.
Bluetooth is still bullshit in terms of latency. It will get better with LE Audio, but whether it will get good enough is anyone’s guess, and it’s still in its infancy and support is almost non-existent.
yeah but if we incorporate Bluetooth in this discussion, then Bluetooth mice and keyboards suck for gaming just as much.
I completely agree with you on that, though. It baffles my mind how, in 2023, in the version 5.2, Bluetooth still sucks so hard in terms of latency.
I wouldn’t consider Audio-Technica anywhere “gaming” related, can be pricey though.
I have a ATH-G1WL (wireless) and ATH-AVA400 (wired) and cannot hear any difference in sound quality what-so-ever, except the 3m cable I have to fiddle with now, which I also have to physically move when changing devices.
Bluetooth also sucks for mice and keyboard, so yeah…
I had an error in my calculations, read comments below for correct math
AptX LL indeed has ~30ms of latency at the cost of bitrate, but last I checked it’s not supported by Windows out of the box. It’s also been generally dropped in favor of the higher latency AptX Adaptive due to requiring a dedicated wireless antenna. The default experience of Bluetooth is still >200ms of latency. Also 30ms is 4.2 frames at 140Hz.
1000 (milliseconds in a second)/140(hz) = ~7.14ms per hz
Not sure how you got 30ms being twice as fast as what a 140hz monitor can display.
I have. You either get good sound quality or low latency. Pretty much every low latency wireless protocol (at least the ones I’m aware of) sacrifices bitrate for latency. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but I can tell when sound quality isn’t great.
I’m not saying there’s no room for improvement, but you’re basically describing the fundamental problem.
Higher quality audio tends to take up more data bandwidth in the wireless protocol, and resilience against interference (and retransmission or error correcting redundancy) will require a longer delay between receiving that signal and actually playing that signal. Some codecs make use of much more efficient ways of turning high quality audio into a lower bandwidth signal, but those usually come at the cost of computational complexity in encoding and decoding - which sacrifices the size and battery life of the wireless device decoding those signals. Or, some codecs allow for more efficient encoding or better error correction, but need to operate on bigger chunks of audio at a time, which might mean that the codec waits for an entire chunk to finish before it gets encoded and sent, which means that latency at a minimum is the length of the chunk. As a result, wireless audio transmission generally needs to trade between audio quality and latency.
With keyboard and mouse data, it’s very, very simple. There are only so many possible keys/buttons, and even the mouse movement is essentially a two dimensional vector with an x-axis and a y-axis in the fixed amount of sampled time. That means less compression necessary to fit the data into very tiny slivers of time, that allows for the polling/refresh rate to be really high, and therefore communicate in a low latency manner.
Yup, this was pretty much supposed to be the point of the meme. Audio, unfortunately, is a much more difficult problem. It seems like we’re getting closer every year though and I’m excited for when wireless audio is as good as wireless keyboards and mice.
300ms is for too much latency for my use case. Playing rhythm games. That being said, I don’t see latency being an issue for anything else.
I really wish other PC guys would stop being like
“noooooo you don’t understand there’s a 10 millisecond lag time with wireless so it’s LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE TRASH, no I don’t care that’s about 1/10th as long as it takes you to blink, I totally notice it and it ruins it for me!!!”
It really seems like some people only get enjoyment from the idea of having the best possible version of something and being elitist about it. Rather than just enjoying their thing that plays games for what it is.
If you play any games where timing matters, 10ms can be the difference between doing the thing and not doing the thing.
Rhythm games are a perfect example. The tightest timing window is often 1frame at 60fps, which is 16ms. If you are reacting to a headphone with 10ms latency then you’ll be missing over half of the timing window. If you also have a wireless keyboard with 10ms then you will react 10ms late, your input will be received another 10ms late and you will miss the entire window and have to adjust your timing to be a full frame early.
Fighting games also commonly use this 1frame window. It’s even worse when we are talking about mouse lag interrupting your hand-eye feedback loop on camera movement. I just tried to play the new Myst on an underpowered laptop with too much frame time with vsync enabled and that was enough to make me unable to navigate a curvy corridor, until I disabled vsync.
Latency is a real problem. To put it in the words of John Carmack
I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?
The other issue is that you start compounding latency. If you’re playing online with a 50ms ping, that hear > react > input registered cycle is suddenly 70ms instead of the 10ms you were expecting. Every single instance of latency you’re adding to the system is taking you another step away from reacting in time.
But my point is 99.99% of people aren’t competitive fighting game players that need to react to a 1 frame window and will be noticeably disadvanged by a 1/100th of a second delay. And any competitive fighting game player will be using a fight stick anyway.
Same with rhythm games. Yes, top level rhythm gamers might have a point with this but 99.999% of gamers are not top level rhythm gamers.
In a rhythm game the difference between a 10ms ping (wired average for just audio) and a 100-300ms ping (Bluetooth average for just audio) is definitely noticeable, at any level of play. With Bluetooth it isn’t even just 1 frame you’ll miss, it’s about a 3rd of a second in the worst case.
This isn’t necessarily a fair comparison because USB receiver headsets latency much closer to wired exist, but most people with wireless headsets will be using Bluetooth, and not aptX LL Bluetooth.
I don’t even play rhythm games, casually playing the music-synced rooms in Celeste (a 2D platformer) was enough to make me stop playing until I could find a wire for my Sony XM5’s.
The latency is unbearable when playing on a midi keyboard. Gaming is not the only thing out there.
You’re very passionate about headphones.
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The latency isnt the issue for me. I just hate stuff that runs on batteries when cables work perfectly fine. Batteries will wear out faster than cables do. (Good cables at least) and this makes more e-waste.
Cables FTW
My Bluetooth headphones have a 3.5mm jack that will bypass the BT function. Love it!
AA rechargeable batteries are better than internal batteries not accessible to the user. And it lasts so much more
Whatever peripheral you have is going to get broken before the battery becomes unusable
Unusable, maybe, but a couple years down the line the battery life is going to suffer
The. Plug it in all the time after that. What’s the difference?
The cable will generally be longer out of the box, and will be less likely to come unplugged if you accidentally pull it
So instead of pulling the cord you want to just break your headphones?
No no certainly not, but I’ve never pulled so hard on a headset that any damage was ever done to my headset
I suppose if you’re living such a rock and roll lifestyle wireless may be best
Can confirm this is not true.
My Corsair HS70 battery could only hold a charge for about 15 minutes after I had it for 1-1.5 years. The battery was the only bad thing about it at the time until I opened it up and replaced it. To make things worse, for that headset you have to manually take out the terminal pins and switch two of them for any Amazon battery because the wires are crossed the wrong way.
95% of people in the same situation would have just thrown the headset out and gotten a new one.
Well where I live they have to offer replacements for at least 2.5 years if the battery becomes degraded, I also know someone who used the Sony MDR 1000X until last year with frequent use and I they just replaced it since they got the XM4 for free.
That’s fair and definitely a good thing, but a decent pair of wired headphones could easily last 3-4x that timespan. E-Waste is a real problem! Good sounding headphones from 10 years ago will probably still sound pretty good today
Wireless headsets are amazing. It is so nice to just be able to walk away from your desk while still hearing the video you were listening to
The problem with latency is a bluetooth problem. Get one that doesn’t use bluetooth or Infrared and you’re golden. Idk about cheaper ones but my steelseries headphones are amazing with zero latency.
Yeah I’ve got a Logitech that uses a WiFi dongle and never noticed problems.
Or use apx HD or apx LL
I always would be afraid that I run out of energy
In fact I’d go as far as say that unlike most mice and in particular all keyboards (which make 0 sense in wireless), wireless headphones are pretty neat. They fix two big issues:
- Getting up in the middle of a call to grab a coffee or so.
- Accidentally yanking wires when swiveling in your chair. You instinctively let go with your hands, so you don’t pull the KB or Mouse, but you don’t always remember to actively take of the headset before you yanked it again.
Sennheiser GSP 370. I literally cannot tell if the have latency, and being Sennheisers they sound really nice, too.
But this particular pair beats one the big issue I’ve always had with wireless headphones, having to charge them… these have 100 hours of battery life.
I don’t charge them for weeks. And when they do finally complain about low battery, you still have more than enough juice to finish that night of gaming, and one more, before actually plugging them in. Unless you leave them unused for months, or don’t plug them in at the end of the session when they do get low, they are ALWAYS ready to be used.
The low battery noise always made me jump because it was so foreign to me. I would regularly charge them when I just felt like it so hearing that noise always confused me at first. I had to replace the ear cups but just a few months ago the power switch finally broke on me. I still miss it.
A powerswitch seems like it’d be repairable.
The automatic standby on the GSP 370 is so good tho, that I’ve almost never touched the powerbutton after I first turned them on, years ago.
They wake up and go to sleep based on whether they receive audio. I have a keyboard shortcut set to switch between them and the speakers. I hit shift+f10 and put them on. No menus, no power switch, nothing.
Difficult to beat Sennheiser on sound and build quality. I have a 30 year old pair of their headphones, still work fine. Currently using the Momentum 4 wireless for gaming, didn’t even consider that there would be any significant delay. 60 hours battery life.
The weird thing about using them for PubG is plugging the USB connection rather than Bluetooth it selects a driver that sounds completely different. Not sure what’s going on there.
Makes me want to try the wireless Sennheiser. I never stuck with the gaming wireless headsets I had gotten because I was not satisfied with the sound quality. I got the 599 I’ve been using, so I do like their headphones.
Wired best because i don’t need to charge it and there is no possibility of signal jamming by operating a microwave.
If operating a microwave interferes with any of your 2.4GHz networks, you need a new microwave.
But then how will he ever join the X-Men?
Nope, my Microwave is older than i am and I’m not going to replace it until it breaks. It works perfectly, not even the light bulb burned through after almost 30 years of semi regular operation.
I don’t have the right to replace something that worked longer than me without it being broken.
If your microwave interferes with your wireless hardware, then it’s a health hazard. You should replace it ASAP.
Microwaves leaking radiation is absolutely not a health hazard.
Thats complete BS. More than anything else in the thread so far.
A health hazard? Absolutely not.
Why did you feel this comment was relevant?
Everyone makes the argument of worrying about charging it, but the cable is still there… Like, when it’s low you plug it in and play as if it was wired. I play casually and plug mine in once every other week (HyperX).
For me it’s great because I hate the wire getting in the way but not everyone is bothered by that so to each their own.
I make the argument that its unnecessary to put a battery in a thing that will move within one square meter for the rest of its lifetime… I just don’t see the positive of a wireless anything on a pc that is wired. A laptop might be a different story, but a tower PC is literally just standing in at place and you can lay the cable nice so it’s not making problems.
I guess for me I also move my tower a lot, several times a year between states, so wireless technology really makes that less painful.
Hm in this case…
I just can remotely access mine when i have to go somewhere else for a while.
Cool
Yeah its pretty convinient not having to truck around a tower pc.
Cables take a lot of space. And this space can be used for better purposes.
I clip my cables to the back of my monitor. Like USB cables for instance. Makes it out of sight normally and easy to access when I need it.
I have a lot of stuff at the back of the monitor, no place for cables.
Even though I use a desktop I still don’t think I could ever swap back to wired headphones. I frequently get up for a variety of reasons and keeping my music playing or continuing to chat with my friends is great. I briefly had to use a wired headset again and I nearly pulled the cable out a few times from getting up.
I thought that too, but now I have a wireless mouse, keyboard, and ear buds and it’s amazing. You never have to worry about the slight tension from a cord, or what the cord will bump into. Complete freedom. The battery on my Logitech keyboard lasts about 3 months before it needs to be recharged.
Some headphones don’t let you use them while charging
You can use them wired and then charge overnight.
My Sony headphones can’t be used while charging
I can walk across my house and even go into my back yard and still get signal from the dongle on the back of my PC. Only place it gets disrupted is when my head is in the fridge but it just goes to robot sounding and doesn’t disconnect
Ok, but why would you do that?
I have a pair of JBL Quantum 810 and charge every other day when using heavily, oh and I can charge it while using, or grab a battery bank and charge on the go. 2.4ghz and Bluetooth. Fuck being tethered
JBL is expensive garbage…
Personal experience? Or just hearsay? I’ve not had an issue with these headset and am extremely satisfied with the battery life. The ANC is good enough I used them while weed whacking and mowing 2 acres
I had a headset from JBL, it broke super fast, the Cushion basically desintegrated after a year and the sound was mediocre.
I now have wired Studio Headphones with a extra mic and it was cheaper, better sound in and out and it lasted 3 years so far without any problems.
My experience with jbl is its hot garbage. You pay for the brand, not the quality.
Cableless is best because there’s no possibility of snagging a cable on something and you can move freely.
For average wireless headphones, sure, but there are plenty of options without lag. Low Latency Bluetooth is a thing and so are 2.4ghz connections. I don’t have issues with either
I use wireless headphones nearly exclusively now but hate wireless mice and keyboards…
… why?
In my case, I really hate charging the keyboard. My Corsair keyboard stops working when it’s fully charged, what? But it only lasts two days on battery so I’m constantly plugging and unplugging it, turning it on and off (otherwise the cat might drain the entire battery by taking a nap on it)
I might as well have a wired keyboard if I have to charge so often. It barely works from 10 feet away, not like I can game from the couch
The best wireless option is still a dongle, longer range and better latency management. One like logi unifying dongle can connect multiple devices.
5ms Bluetooth latency is quite a few years away. The charging and backup has gotten better recently.
I heard the unifying dongle adds latency, though
My Logitech wireless can work both plugged and unplugged, can connect to multiple computers at the same time and battery charge lasts for weeks.
It works plugged, but not if the battery is full
The latency has been good for a while. The sound-quality has also caught up recently too with stuff like the Audeze Maxwell
I’ve been using wireless headsets since 2016 and even then the latency was decent. People are just ignorant and don’t have first hand experience
I did try wireless headsets back then but found the sound quality kinda sucked haha but yea latency was a non-issue
Audeze nuts in you face. Gottem
I really like my steelseries artics 7. Battery last so long, I sometimes forget when I last recharge them.
Also amazing reach, I can go anywhere in my house while keep on listening.
I use wired keyboard and mouse, because they’re always in the same place and the cords don’t bother me.
If its the version where you can easily slide off and on the battery to replace it and charge the second one on the station, then its nice and I want one, they are nowhere to find and purchase.
If its the one that needs to open up a cap to change the battery, and only works with Windows only Sign-in Drivers then its the worst headset I ever come across.
I just forgot which one got the name because its the same company and series. (Maybe “Nova” were the worse ones, they are newer)
I think you can’t easily open up to replace the battery. But i don’t see the need for that. If it needs to be charged when i need it, just can plug in the power cord and keep on using is.
Don’t ever had any problems with the drivers, i just plug it, first time windows need it to set it up and worked great. With steelseries own software I also don’t have any problems. Only downside is that if you want better quality audio, you need to open the software.
I’m constantly unplugging and plugging in the receiver between my pc and ps5 without any problems.
Yeah no, I would recommend this to noone because you are literally forced to get an Account and let the software run constantly just to get pro feature, meanwhile you pay a heck ton of money to it. Huge downgrade, can’t use it with 90% of different devices because only Windows 10 and 11 is supported, no Xbox, Playstation, Phone, Linux PC or Steam Deck. Except you love bad Audio for which the price is not worth for.
A friend had the older ones that had the exact features but the software is purely on the Station. Additionally on the older ones you could slide the batteries in and out which seem to have a very satisfying feeling. (I guess swapping increased from 2 seconds to 60seconds for the newer ones?)
Found the post on which I created my opinion on the headset. https://www.reddit.com/r/steelseries/comments/v9kq26/steelseries_nova_pro_wireless_linux_and_bad/
Yeah I’ve got the same one and have had no issues with it (besides being too lazy about charging it and having to quickly plug in mid-meeting which is just user error).
It’s charge lasts a while but I only use it for a few hours at a time max so maybe that’s more of why I only have to charge it once every week or so.
Nice to be able to walk around most of the house without disconnecting and I haven’t noticed any latency issues.
audio quality too, man the difference that I have experienced is night and day between my 80$ DUNU Titan S IEM and the 200$ Razer Opus 2021, the Opus is now mostly sitting collecting dust
Go watch Crinacle:)
The affordable stuff is usually cabled, so I use that.
You rich asses talking about latency, I’m just out here trying to keep gaming.
My wireless headphones have a double battery meaning I never have to charge them. My wireless mouse and keyboard are always connected as they run out of battery to fast…
I just prefer cable for those two. For the keyboard cable makes no difference to me. Mice cables have come a long way and a good one is barely noticeable.
Headphones though, I’m never going back to the cord. Both Sony XM and Bose QC work great for me.
