1y ago

Latency just still isn't there unfortunately

203 comments

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
  
  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.
  
  Next time buy headphones with AptX low latency support.
  
  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 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
  
  Sennheiser headphones support AptX low latency. 40ms is very good for most uses. And you can plug them if you need.
- 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.
  
  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?
- I hate wires in general. Everything that can be wireless IS wireless at my home.
  
  This sounds like absolute hell.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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

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
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
  
  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.

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

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.
- 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.
  
  Some headphones don't let you use them while charging
  
  My Sony headphones can't be used while charging
- Cableless is best because there’s no possibility of snagging a cable on something and you can move freely.

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.

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.
- 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 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

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
- 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)
  
  This is the one i got.
  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.

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
- 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!

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:)

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.

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.

I use the Sennheiser Momentum 4 with no latency problems at all.
Although gaming is usually on speakers for me (Edifier) and that's all cables.
- The problem with a personal endorsement is that you never know if it's actually good or if the person is bad at noticing it.
- I'm super annoyed by audio latency and my Momentum 4s are the first Bluetooth headphones I'm able to use while gaming without being irritated.

is this a common problem? I just use the same soundcore p3 earbuds for gaming or listening to music from my phone
- I have their Space A40s. I can definitely feel the latency (~150-200ms), and Game Mode barely makes a difference at all. They're actually lower latency compared to yours, according to Rtings...
  Doesn't help that they disable the EQ in Game Mode, because this specific model is just way too muddy and veiled for my tastes, otherwise.
  
  strange I don't really feel that latency even tho I should if it's that high

I've got Nova Pro Wireless on my desk and they're fucking great. No noticeable latency and the sound is impressive too.

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

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

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.

Ironically, if they were analog wireless, thered be no latency at all
- You have a pretty noticeable fidelity drop when going over radio waves, though. Any pro audio devices like wireless microphones or IEMs will go over radio waves, though. Works fine for on stage use but isn't ideal in other settings.
- So basically radio? It would still be limited by the speed of light, you would have nanoseconds (or microseconds?) of latency!
  
  Ten nanoseconds of travel time for every three meters of distance, or roughly one nanosecond per foot.
  
  Wired head phones are also limited by the speed of light
- Even cable has latency...

I learn this lesson about twice a year. One of these years that shit is going to be good.

Hm. The only wireless thing on my gaming engine are the headphones, because I stepped over the cables a few times

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.

I wish they made open wireless. I know you lose quality in wireless but I love the sound stage.
- Grado makes the GW-100x and there's also the wireless Koss porta pros
  
  Oooh! Thank you. Those are the first I've seen. Going to look into reviews and see if the GW-100x will work for me.
  
  I loved my porta pros as a teenager. But my god the wireless solution is atrocious. A closed loop headset? Why the hell didn’t they put those things inside the hollow plastic temple rests….

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 love my wireless headphones but they have fallen so many times that the left one is completely useless.

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.

Wait, you're still using BT 4.0? In 2023?

203 comments

BWOOOOOP LOW BATTERY