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 $100 with some BT dac maybe
That’s not a gaming headphone. A proper gaming headphone have near zero latency, you can even play rhythm games with it. Usually it will come with it’s own wireless dongle and doesn’t use Bluetooth at all.
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I bought headphones with aptxLL, only to find out that newer Qualcomm chipsets have depricared it in favor of aptx adaptive. It’s not backward compatible and at the time there wasn’t a single adaptive set of headphones on the market. I would either have to buy a >4 year old phone or get a new pair of overpriced headphones to use it now.
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Sure would be cool if Windows supported anything but AAC and SBC though…
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From what I’ve seen this isn’t true. Search for “Windows AptX LL” and you’ll see dozens of ways you might install drivers that add support. The most common advice seems to be to buy a dongle that supports it.
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AptX and AptX LL are not the same thing. AptX has the same latency as LDAC and SBC: >200ms; whereas AptX LL is actually decent at ~30ms. AptX is supported by Windows out of the box, AptX LL is not.
Huh, must be my hardware then. It is getting kinda old…
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Aren’t those supposed to be like, 300$ 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.
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.
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I have XM4s too and dont notice it at all.
I have G533 which are even discontinued from production, they have no real latency.
Have you used a wireless set of headphones lately?
With Bluetooth latency isn’t an issue for media, but it’s noticeable while gaming. But over 2.4GHz… there’s no noticeable latency at all.
Barely noticeable while gaming. Rhythm games for sure, but otherwise my biggest complaint is that all 2.4ghz headphones are “gaming” headphones. Not many low latency high end options.
Every rhythm game worth its salt has visual offset nowadays so its not an issue
Unfortunately, my game is not a rhythm game. I basically can’t tell which of my shots hit the target. If I shoot 3 times in 300ms, I don’t hear the first shot until I click the second time, so if I miss the first shot, it sounds like I missed the second shot, it’s very jarring
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It doesn’t compare since 2.4gh, is half at 15-20ms of latency. Though since I primarily play rhythm games, I like my headphones wired anyways.
Bluetooth uses the 2.4GHz spectrum by the way
It employs UHF radio waves in the ISM bands, from 2.402 GHz to 2.48 GHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth?wprov=sfla1
But I know what you mean, those headsets with a separate dongle work good enough. Shame really, that Bluetooth hasn’t caught up by now, except some barely supported low-latency codecs
It’s not the band, it’s the Bluetooth stack. Bluetooth sucks as a standard.
Not only standard itself, but also low quality implementations both in hardware and software. And while major OSes’ BT stacks continue to gradually improve over time they won’t help you if you Bluetooth hardware or device you are trying to connect to (again both hardware and software) are trash. It’s a curse of every open standard, no matter how good or bad it is by itself - there always will be shitty implementations. And if there are a lot of them (like in case of BT) then majority of them will be shitty.
It’s not the spectrum; it’s Bluetooth vs fixed-pair generic RF.
I’ll never understand wireless keyboards. They just sit on the desk? Why go through the hassle of charging it?
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This sounds like absolute 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.
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.
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
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Cables are ugly
The only wireless keyboard I can understand is something like the Corsair k63 with the lapboard attachment. I’ve got one with my second PC connected to my TV. It’s really pretty great!
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.
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 had an error in my calculations, read comments below for correct math
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.
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.
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 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.
This wasn’t meant to be the point of the meme at all. Wireless keyboards and mice have overcome the issues that made them objectively worse than their wired counterparts (latency and accuracy). Unfortunately though with wireless headphones you either get low latency or good audio quality, and I’m yet to find headphones that do both well. At the moment I have WH-1000XM4s I use for music at work and ATH-M50Xs I use for games. If I could get the best of both worlds I absolutely would, but it seems like every good sounding wireless headphones have awful latency that’s too jarring to ignore when playing games.
Arctic Pro Wireless headset might be expensive but they use proprietary WiFi signal from their receiver to the headphones that makes response time so fast, the latency is a non issue and almost equivalent to a cable connection.
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You’re very passionate about headphones.
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.
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
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It works plugged, but not if the battery is full
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
The latency has been good for a while. The sound-quality has also caught up recently too with stuff like the Audeze Maxwell
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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
Only issue I’ve ever had with wireless headphones is the ear piercing screech they do when the battery is running low
Listening to quiet-ish youtube video
BWOOOOOP LOW BATTERY
This is me listening to ASMR almost asleep. God damn headphones. I am in the middle of trying to figure out how to reprogram another bt device that has a Chinese lady that yells at me even louder than the headphones. I probably will give up but I sure wished these manufacturers would chill with the warning volume.
Mine yell at me in a British accent.
Love my GSP 370s. The low battery warning is just a quiet bleep, and the 100 hour battery life means you seldom hear it, and when you do, you still have so much time left that the low battery sound only plays like once an hour once you have less than 10 hours left.
It’s not so much a PLUG ME IN NOW, as a “hey, I gotchu for tonight, but plug me in when ur done”.
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As long as you use headphones and a bluetooth adapter that both support APTX LL (low-latency), it’s instantaneous for me. Same as using it wired.
As a gamer and (almost) audiophile, any solution besides wired is just dancing around tradeoffs to get a worse result for more money. I’ll stick with my cord.
Tbh I just get jelous when my discord buds go take a piss or Cook some food and keep talking while im tethered to a 3m or so semi circle around my desk
I just join the call on my phone when I step away from my desktop
Is it any different vs headphones working via WiFi?
Not sure, I haven’t used wifi-based headphones before. I just know I don’t notice any audio latency when using APTX-LL supporting headphoens/adapter that I’ve noticed when just using regular bluetooth
EXTRA WORK!
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.
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.
