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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

If you need to move around, wired headphones suck. IME, interference and latency are non issues with BT. Otherwise, the lighting to 3.5mm dongle works perfectly.

At my desk, i do have wired headphones, but they are plugged into my TB dock.

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Yeah, at my desk I use a decent pair of cans (HD6XX or K550 depending on situation) hooked up to a nice DAC/amp since there, cords aren't much of an annoyance. Especially the type on larger headphones which is thicker and far less prone to tangling.

Away from the desk though? Bluetooth all the way. Even if I'm just lounging on my bed bluetooth is better because there's no wires for the cat that will most assuredly be in my lap to chew.

Just out of curiosity, what bluetooth do you use? There is no bluetooth options on the market that don't actively physically hurt my ears in a way that wired headphones never ever have.

Prior to the pandemic it was mostly AirPods Pro, but now that I spend most of my time at home it's a pair of AirPods Max. In the past I've also used a pair of Sony WH-1000MX3 which were pretty comfortable.

> IME, interference and latency are non issues with BT.

Depends on your usecase. Music and Zoom is fine, but for competitive gaming I'd always go wired.

Music might be fine for listening, but it is emphatically not fine for playing. It's completely unusable. It's like trying to talk while listening yourself 100ms delayed. Probably fine for competitive gaming if you're just spectating too.

While off-topic, somehow Apple has screwed this up in the M1 MacBook Air built-in audio hardware too. I wanted some monitoring while playing acoustic the other day so I opened logic and rather than connect my expensive audio interface, I just wanted to use the built-in mic and headphone output to monitor myself playing and singing in real time. For some reason there was still an audible delay even though I wasn’t using plugins and had the buffer set very low. I’m pretty sure it was in low latency mode… you shouldn’t have to use an external audio interface just to do real time monitoring like that such a simple use case.

I've been under the impression this whole time that you need a specialty audio interface if you ever want to do near-real-time (<10ms) monitoring or recording. I'd been lead to believe years ago that default consumer audio hardware just cannot do it.

So did that work prior to M1?

AptX low latency apparently makes it better (35ms is the "guarantee"), but I've honestly not tried it. I'm not going to make my 400FPS on a 240hz monitor low latency gaming in Valorant worse by going wireless for audio.

Though I do use a wireless mouse (G Pro X Superlight) and it's brilliant, though it's wireless adapter is attached to a cord that lets me plug it in to keep going if I forgot to charge it, so its the best of both worlds.

Really, its only my mouse that I move around enough for wireless to be worth it in competitive gaming.

I played competitive FPS games for years at high ranks with a Bluetooth headset before learning of the delay. I did not notice. However, for a while I switched to a Bluetooth keyboard and until I realized the input delay was severely impacting my performance. Wireless mice (non-Bluetooth) on the other hand have low enough latency that most pros are fine using them.

Some advice for Bluetooth headset gamers - Bluetooth completely breaks the audio for some games like Battlefield 1. The only solution is to go into device manager and disabling Handsfree Telephony on your device.

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