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
That’s fair. I don’t have a real use case for a wireless keyboard either, but the one I have isn’t particularly inconvenient. I would just leave it plugged in, and unplug it if I ever needed it to be wireless.
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 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
Hm. The only wireless thing on my gaming engine are the headphones, because I stepped over the cables a few times
Is this on Linux or Windows? Haven’t noticed anything on Linux…
It’s just inherent in bluetooth
What about 2.4 GHz based wireless? I know logitech has that tech but I haven’t looked into audio latency since I used wired anyways, but I have been curious about it
I have Logitech G535. And I play osu!. I’m pretty sure there is latency but I couldn’t feel any difference between them and headphones connected to DAC. So if there’s any latency there, it is definitely less than 5ms.
Sweeto, thanks
I play rhythm games on PC. I use ASIO4ALL to bypass any kind of audio processing being done by my OS to reduce audio latency as much as possible, and I do research before even attempting to buy any monitor. I got a Logitech Z407 for my birthday and even using the audio jack it introduces enough audio lag (~3ms) that I went back to play on wired headphones.
There is no way, you notice 3ms of latency
Probably not, I can’t inmediately notice it, but you see, games like Ez2On Reboot: R have a very robust customization suite, including timing adjustment and indicators for when you press a key too early or too late. The game combines both features on a single option where you play a song while the game automatically adjusts the delay between your keystrokes and the “target” you’re supposed to be hitting. Using that feature, the game added around 3ms window to my keystrokes, and after a couple of game sessions, you can actually feel the game being slightly off-beat (since those kind of games actually play sounds whenever you press a key, your “play” sounds slightly delayed using the rest of the song being auto played by the PC). Also, the early/late counter at the end of each song increases one way or another. Again, it’s not immediately noticeable, but you feel something’s off and the results screen can confirm it.
People don’t understand that while 3ms is extremely short, in rhythm games people can time the switches of their keys to hit a few ms window by consistently moving the fingers at the same speed
Something you may not be able to see (if you flash something for 3ms it’s not guaranteed we can be able to recognize it), but it’s a timing you can hit because of practice
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.
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!
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
Only issue I’ve ever had with wireless headphones is the ear piercing screech they do when the battery is running low
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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”.
I love my wireless headphones but they have fallen so many times that the left one is completely useless.
Wireless Mice and Wireless Keyboard are a no for me.
Not because of latency, but because of the annoyance of needing to charge them.
I technically have a wireless mouse, that I just keep wired perpetually.
Wireless sounds nice because it’s clean, but it’s terrible to use because of the nature of a battery being finite.
The biggest issue imo is the microphone quality. Audio quality and latency have improved a lot over the years but so many wireless headsets still have garbage mic quality. The Logitech g pro lightspeed costs $250 and sounds worse than a $10 Webcam mic. I only went wireless after the razer blackshark 2023 came out. The microphone is by far the best mic I’ve heard in a wireless headset.
I’ve always used desktop microphones, but that’s an issue I didn’t even consider. Tbh it seems like most “gamer” headsets slap on the shittiest microphones because they affect you the least and it ticks another box on the product page.
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.
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.
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.
I am extremely rough with my headphones to the point that I’d always break the cable on wired headsets in a few months. Yeah, wireless isn’t on par with wired headphones in every single way yet, but once I switched to Bluetooth, I was able to keep using my headphones for years at a time before the battery would give out. Add in that I can wander around freely with my headphones, and yeah, the latency is a pretty good tradeoff for my situation
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.
Sennheiser headphones support AptX low latency. 40ms is very good for most uses. And you can plug them if you need.
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.
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
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 spectrum; it’s Bluetooth vs fixed-pair generic RF.
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.
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
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.
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
Fuckin’ what? Is this meme 10 years old or what?
I have G533 which are even discontinued from production, they have no real latency.
I have Sony xm 3 headphones and I can’t game on them because everything is delayed like 100ms
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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Gaming is the far from what they were designed for. When listening to music or whatever you couldn’t care less about a delay.
Bluetooth is a terrible standard for gaming. You’d want something with its own dedicated 2.4ghz dongle.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
my biggest issue with (my specific) wireless headphones is that the sound is shit when i am also using the mic. other than that, theyre fine
