Hi all.
I commented on a youtube video for someone asking why the audio work work via Bluetooth on the Xbox one controller. My understanding is it would be impossible to encode, transmit and then decode fast enough for live gaming or live anything.
Naturally I have had a barrage of people counter this saying there are “bluetooth gaming headsets” on the market and that I’m not “setting up bluetooth properly”.?
I had a month project trying to build a Linux based bluetooth audio receiver for all my devices, the lag caused me to give up on it. But I learned a lot about audio, bluetooth and its limitations.
Has bluetooth and bluetooth audio moved on? Am I missing something, it would seem there are BT headsets branded with “gaming” in the title. Is BT now ok to use for live audio?
Thanks, TT24
From my understanding, the PS4 controllers run off of Bluetooth, have built in audio and mic output, and their latency is somewhat minimal in my experience with it.
Of course, with lighting, rumble, audio and mic, and controller inputs enabled, the battery in the controller drains pretty quickly. But that’s expected.
Keep an eye on the new Bluetooth 5.0 protocol, and the devices that come from that. It should be a lot better than previous generations. Hopefully…
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/bluetooth-core-specification/bluetooth5
1 Like
Nice, I’ve had little time with the PS controller. And when I have used one with noise coming from its fairly snappy. But nice to know. No idea why MS cant do the same when connected to my laptop.
Might need to revisit my bluetooth receiver project but guess Sony etc have the means to make it work well, where me messing with Pulse Audio on a spare laptop will take a little more work. I was getting a good .5 seconds delay on a good day with a2dp.
I did think BT audio was inherently laggy, like the apple earpods pausing video to sync with sound on a mac. Strange how Sony have managed it if its seamless via the headphone jack?
Thanks for that!
1 Like
I can’t say it’s totally seamless, because it’s been a long time since I used that feature on my PS4, but I don’t ever remember it being a problem.
Good luck to ya on making your own! If you ever make any progress, be sure to start a thread on it. I’m sure there are plenty of people here that would be interested in it, including me.
1 Like
That bluetooth audio is its own audio device, so update its driver before doing anything
Its always such mess to have more than 1, but still as I was testing my bluetooth headphones, that X370 Taichi driver made the device crash from YouTube video, and it was anyways doing odd on/off clips when switching songs
Soo… updated latest driver from Intel’s site and it worked just fine that time I was still testing it
Havent used since 
Considering that MS cant even make that battery indicator work right with the controller and that i have to re sync the controller if i charge it i think it may be more that they don’t care.
As for the PS4 controller there is delay but the delay that voice chat has covers it up.
I have a pair of bluetooth earphones with THIS chipset from Qualcomm and, even with an old phone (Moto G 2013), I can see videos on youtube without a big “lipsync issue”. If I look closely I can barely perceive a fraction of a second delay but it’s nothing that stops me from using them even for videos. They’re BT4.1 so bluetooth is surely capable, for my experience, to deliver a good experience. But it’s a wireless connection so delay will always be present. You can reduce delay increasing the frequency of a signal but that’s a totally different thing.
PS4 bluetooth is pretty low latency. The catch is that Sony has some special sauce that only works with the PS3. They did the same with the PS3 controller but it did not support audio.
If you are on MS Windows, you may need to download and install ASIO 4 all. Bluetooth in general has a bult in delay because of its very nature. When you though bluetooth audio into the mix, the best latency that you can really get is about 19ms right now. BT5 may be better but we will see. BT4 and BT4LE have diverged a little bit. They both have improvements that break most compatibility with the other.
Fascinating, not used aptX at all myself but the marketing wank sounds great. Maybe with tech like this today the encode decode latency is much much better than what I’ve worked with in the past.
On my Sony phone and BT speaker they have LDAC as their special sauce, range and quality are very good but any interference and it drops down to standard quality or jumps. It sounds very much like what Qualcomm’s aptX does.
But using my speakers on Windows or Linux and their is a noticeable delay. Perhaps its because desktop OS’ arnt really made/tuned for the wireless world unlike mobile devices.
@Billgatez, you may find this interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYW4J6FyyZU but doesn’t explain MS and their controller audio problems.