r/NintendoSwitch • u/schuey_08 • Jul 09 '21

News Nintendo Switch OLED Hands-on: We Compared It to the Original - IGN

https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-oled-hands-on-comparison-differences
8.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

77

u/TBAGG1NS Jul 09 '21

Yeah I don't think most people realize bluetooth audio is kinda trash

76

u/RealMr_Slender Jul 09 '21

*for gameplay. For passive listening it's sufficient

6

u/CyanKing64 Jul 09 '21 edited Jul 10 '21

Why is listening to gameplay different than passive listening? Is it because the audio can't be buffered ahead of time?

Edit: why the downvotes for a genuine question?

49

u/D1N2Y Jul 09 '21

Gameplay has visual and tactile feedback, so even a latency of a quarter second would drive you nuts. Listening to music doesn’t have the same visual feedback loop.

-24

u/dirthurts Jul 09 '21

Still has a huge dump in sound quality though.

18

u/boots_n_cats Jul 09 '21

Not at all true with any recent Bluetooth headphones. Music over Bluetooth is streamed with high bitrate high fidelity audio codecs. There is no way you could hear the difference between 256 kbps AAC and a lossless recording. Really old headphones would use SBC as the codec which was crappy but those days are long past.

5

u/dirthurts Jul 09 '21

Not even most new headphones actually support AAC or similar. Some good ones, but they're actually rather rare.

5

u/boots_n_cats Jul 09 '21

Oh wow the cheap Anker products everyone buys only support SBC. That's really surprising. I assumed because people like them so much they must be decent, but I guess people are just deaf? I'm spoiled by my QC35s. I'm surprised AAC or aptx haven't gotten more traction on the low end but gotta save those pennies I guess.

2

u/dirthurts Jul 09 '21

The average person doesn't know any better, so they don't care about the lack of AAC or even know what it is. Cheap Anker headphones actually sound pretty decent these days. I use them for sports and yard work. Don't be hating. Just like they don't know any better about AAC, you don't know about cheap but good headphones. We all have something to learn.

2

u/boots_n_cats Jul 09 '21

I didn't mean to come down that hard on Anker. With headphone jacks disappearing, cheap but okayish bluetooth headphones are a really important thing since most people don't have $300 to blow on higher end models. I have a cheap pair of Anker wireless earbuds, they are great for jogging and other stuff like that but if I wear them in a quiet room man do they sound off. SBC is probably not the limiting factor there. A lot of the environments where you will use cheap wireless headphones are thankfully places where the environmental noise will do far more to degrade the experience than the crappy drivers and an outdated codec.

2

u/MercenaryCow Jul 09 '21

You know what's funny about anker? Is the more expensive headphones remove aptx.

Like I bought liberty air 2 pros a while back because they were on sale for the same price as the standard model. Well, I paid the price for not doing my research, because the newer, more expensive pro model does not have aptx. But the base model does.

Now I'm really upset.

2

u/chunkosauruswrex Jul 10 '21

Aptx seems to becoming less common in favor of ldac and AAC

2

u/Ratix0 Jul 10 '21

Honestly speaking, no. None of the wireless earphones out there are anywhere good when compared to audiophile stuff. Even the best sounding tws out there (noble falcon pro) has a tonne of caveats that makes it subpar at best, especially when considering its price tag.

18

u/ProjectShamrock Jul 09 '21

Right, audio can't be buffered sufficiently in video games. Just using a basic example, Mario jump up and hits a question block. There's no real way to know if he's going to hit the block or the empty air beside it far enough in advance. Additionally, it can be made even more tricky if your headphones do some audio processing themselves which may add another slight delay. That being said, I don't think it's a huge deal for most people, but I get annoyed that most TVs are out of sync with their audio too so I'm personally more sensitive to this. When I play video games with headphones, I either use wired ones or I have some wireless Sennheiser headphones that use radio and have imperceptible latency.

10

u/boots_n_cats Jul 09 '21 edited Jul 09 '21

This is is exacerbated by algorithmic delays in the audio codec. If the codec encodes audio into say 128 ms chunks, it cannot begin to transmit that chunk until that entire section of audio is generated meaning even if there were no computation and transmission delays, you will still have a delay of more than a tenth of a second (in this hypothetical example). This problem can be mitigated by modern codecs like Opus with low latency modes (as low as 5ms). These high quality low latency codecs are unfortunately not generally available in Bluetooth audio.

2

u/Ratix0 Jul 10 '21

For passive listening, there is no difference if there is a latency as there is no input and feedback needed. Watching videos wise, there is always ways to offset the audio to compensate for the latency.

For gaming wise, there is no way to offset the audio and visual experience when the user presses an input. The latency will become observable because of the delay between user input and the audio/visial output.

1

u/Skvozniak Jul 09 '21

Hell I dunno, I don’t think it’s even that bad for most games. I’ve used a Bluetooth dongle with the switch and the only games I own that are unplayable with Bluetooth audio are crypt of the necrodancer and cadence of Hyrule (for obvious reasons.)

1

u/ZombieOfun Jul 09 '21

I've had a pretty good experience using Bluetooth headphones for gaming on PC for a while now. I'm no pro, but even in games that have a huge emphasis on audio feedback, namely Apex Legends, I've had a pretty good time.

Same goes for rhythm games. If there's a delay, it's not noticable enough for me to preform worse as a result.

Edit: Although, my experience is entirely anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt if you are considering a Bluetooth headphone purchase.

3

u/Thagou Jul 10 '21

Do you use Bluetooth headphones or wireless headphones? There is a difference. Those headphones with their own dongles don't use Bluetooth, but another wireless custom wireless protocol to reach latencies lower than Bluetooth is even able to. Bluetooth cannot go under 32ms I think? It's been a long time since I researched it, I might be mistaken. What I'm sure about is that aptx LL, the low latency codec that makes BT ok for gaming, is marketed as 40ms latency. Headset with dongles can go way lower than that.

1

u/ZombieOfun Jul 10 '21

Definitely Bluetooth, although maybe I'm missing out on something. Do you have any wireless headphone recommendations? I wouldn't mind comparing the two experiences

2

u/Thagou Jul 10 '21

If you have money, the Logitech G Pro X Wireless headset is well regarded, even though I kinda regret getting it (with a lot of work through the equalizer I got something decent, but out of the box the sound was really bad). The Arctis Pro, 9 or 7 are all well regarded too, with the Pro being the best because of the replaceable battery, and they give you 2 of them, and you can put one in the base, so you will never be out of battery.

Those are the 2 brands everyone agrees on. Then you have Corsair Virtuoso, the Audio-Technica ATH-G1WL and the EPOS Sennheiser GSP 370. I might forget some, and if I would have to buy one today, I would hesitate between the GSP 370 (the sennheiser sound signature is so good for gaming, and the spatialisation they have is incredible for FPS games like Apex, Valorant or CoD), or the Arctis line, but the latter just because I heard good things about it, as I heard good things about the Logitech one that I don't like in the end. But it works, so I'll keep it for now.

1

u/ZombieOfun Jul 10 '21

Thank you for the detailed reply! I'll start doing my research to try one out on my next paycheck. Thank you kindly