Baz Lafr

I ended up getting the Avantree DG80 and the Shure Aonic 50's. Range, audio quality and latency are all excellent and I'm really happy with this new setup and thanks again for your help. I just wanted to say for people who are reading this wanting to connect headsets that they will have to do additional research. Avantree make it clear that audio playback and audio recording can't be done simultaneously with this particular device without severely reducing the playback quality (and it probably affects the recording quality as well). I discovered this first hand when Windows set the Avantree dongle as the default recording device, and as soon as the mics on my Bluetooth headphones were accessed by an application (in this case, a videogame), the audio quality dropped to intolerably poor levels. I have a feeling that there aren't any dongles that exist yet which can handle both playback and recording while maintaining low latency, but if they do, then I imagine the price point will be far higher than what we're talking about here.

Thanks for clearing that up. I'll definitely pursue the route you originally suggested then: AptX LL headphones with the Avantree DG80. Thanks again.

Thanks for your response, I really appreciate this. Your mentioning of AptX LL was a great starting point for further research. I discovered other codecs such as LDAC, and I found bigger receivers such as the Auris Blume HD and Pro, among other things. It all looks entirely worthwhile; I don't really have to connect my devices from the Windows Bluetooth menu anyway. One problem that I do see is that the Auris receivers seem to run Bluetooth 5.0, so I think waiting for updates to this hardware would be better. This however has given me the peace of mind to know that there is a reasonable alternative available if my current RF headphones actually die on me, but for now I would rather wait for things to develop a bit further in this space before upgrading my setup. Thanks for your help!

I'm making this post because I seem to have a very eccentric preference when it comes to using headphones with a PC. For the last 5 years, I have opted for RF headphones (namely the Sennheiser RS 185 headphones) to connect to my audio interface which I use with my desktop PC. These are a very niche type of wireless headphones which are often advertised as 'home theatre headphones', because that's the typical use case that companies have tried to advertise for. Me? I'm just a humble computer user who doesn't want to have to stop listening to what's playing on their PC while getting up to go to the kitchen, or to politely defecate in the bog, or to do all sorts of other things that a cord would prohibit. Furthermore, RF headphones (especially 5+ years ago) were infinitely better than Bluetooth headphones when it came to latency and range; I suspect that the latency aspect still can't be matched by the best Bluetooth standards of today, although I'm also phenomenally ignorant so there's a chance that I'm wrong. I'm having issues with my old RS 185's, and I'm considering an upgrade. The problem is that RF headphones are becoming increasingly harder to come by. The niche market for them obviously hasn't sustained their production; options are limited, and the best options are often discontinued products (like the Sony L600's) which are difficult to find in brand new condition and can be a bit overpriced. For the record, I won't be getting the Sennheiser RS 195's because the frequency response is heinous; the low-end frequency response alone would be morally capable of slaughtering children if it were sentient. Therefore, I have five questions: 1. Do any of you know good RF headphones for me to buy to replace my RS 185's? (I'm assuming not, it's fine if you don't) 2. (The main question) If I switch to Bluetooth (particularly Bluetooth 5.2), can I expect noticeable latency with my headphones when using them with a computer? 3. Does the PCIe card that I use for Bluetooth 5.2 matter? Are there better or worse options? 4. Do the WiFi antennae that attach to WiFi PCIe cards relate in any way to Bluetooth connectivity or does Bluetooth just connect directly to the card? 5. Do the Bluetooth headphones I choose have an effect on latency, or are all Bluetooth 5.2 headphones created equal when it comes to latency? Obviously, if you have insights which go beyond the scope of the questions I've asked, you're fully welcome to share them. If I have further concerns or questions I'll be sure to ask them in subsequent posts. Thanks for your time, Baz Lafr

Excellent. Again, I was just worried that it was something unusual and I'd have to start worrying about the reliability of the drive. I haven't had a drive this large before so this new for me. Thanks for the reply.

Strange, it's only a normal .mp3 file. I uploaded it here.

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum and I'd like to preface this by saying that my tech knowledge is probably intermediate, as opposed to advanced, so I was hoping to get some opinions from folks more experienced with HDDs than I am. I'm really unsure and frustrated at the moment and you'll soon understand why. I've had a pretty wonky storage solution for a while now involving multiple external hard drives connected via USB 3.0, and some weeks ago I found that my newest drive of them all, an 8TB WD My Book, had started making grinding noises during writes. It can't be more than a year and a half old. This was the last straw that pushed me to invest in a cleaner, more organised storage solution: an 8-bay hard drive enclosure in a JBOD configuration. My first purchase for the enclosure was a Seagate Ironwolf 10TB NAS HDD, which is designed for that kind of application. I set up the enclosure with the brand new 10TB HDD and started transferring files to it from my 8TB WD external, my intention being to get the files over to the new drive before the older grinding one possibly fails. While everything seemed to be transferring fine, I could hear a new grinding sound. It was coming from my hard drive enclosure; my brand new 10TB Seagate NAS drive. I recorded the sound of the drive making the 'grinding noise' (as I describe it) with my microphone and I'd like you guys to tell me if I'm right in believing this to be an unusual and worrisome sound for a HDD to be making, particularly when it's brand new, or if I'm mistaken and this is actually a normal sound for a HDD to make under load when performing writes. If it helps, I was transferring a folder with 70GB worth of image files to the drive while I was recording this. Frustratingly, I couldn't get the older WD drive to make a grinding noise to compare, but the grinding noise I'm talking about with the Seagate drive is distinctly different to the WD's noises and was clearly coming from the hard drive enclosure. You can also hear the sound echoing a little inside the enclosure in the recording. The enclosure is an Icybox IB-3680 and I'm positive that the noises aren't from the enclosure itself, as they clearly coincide with the activity of the drive inside it. I've noticed that with the WD drive, it's only made those noises during torrent transfers, whereas this new drive (as previously mentioned) seems to do it even when transferring an images folder to it. In conclusion, I'm willing to put up with annoying noises like these if this is normal for HDDs. My senior concern here is the reliability of the drive when it's making such noises straight out of the box, because I don't want to transfer 10TB worth of files to a drive that's just going to die on me in a year anyway. Thanks for your help in advance! Seagate Ironwolf NAS HDD Noise.mp3