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.
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.
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.