Wireless audio for Oculus Quest

[alan.nikola.newton]

Hi guys,

 

I am really struggling to find a good solution to a problem that I expected many more people to have. While I think my problem is simple enough, this post ended up being really long, but mostly because I tried to be thorough in explaining what I have already tried.

I have a decent 5.0 home theater setup powered by a Marantz SR7012, and I have an Oculus Quest, which I mainly use for playing Beat Saber. So obviously, I want to hook my Quest up the home theater instead of using the built-in speakers (I don't like to use headphones while playing VR for multiple reasons). While I could use a simple 3.5mm to RCA cable, that completely ruins the revolutionary untethered experience that was a huge selling point of the quest for me. In regular beat saber a cable is just annoying, but for games where you turn around a lot (like robo recall, er even beat saber 360° levels) it's an outright nightmare.

 

What I have tried so far:

• Casting to my tv (via built-in chromecast) has a 2s lag, which is unacceptable.
• Connecting via the quest's built-in bluetooth (I tried multiple devices) results in either unacceptable lag or, in the case of beat saber, unbelievable stuttering in the graphics of the game.
• A taotronics bluetooth transmitter (link) strapped to my Quest and connected via the headphone jack, paired with a few different devices.
  • My AV receiver → results in unacceptable lag.
  • A Denon Heos 3 multiroom speaker → results in unacceptable lag.
  • A second identical bluetooth transmitter (it also has a receiver mode), which I can then hook up to my AV receiver with an analog input → results in unacceptable lag.
  • An old harman kardon bluetooth speaker → results in no noticeable lag, but obviously doesn't sound as good as my home theater setup.
  • Another, more expensive, bluetooth transmitter/receiver → results in unacceptable lag.
  • FYI, none of these devices suffer from any noticeable lag when I pair them with my phone and use that to stream audio to them.
• The aforementioned slightly more expensive bluetooth transmitter/receiver, also paired a few different devices
  • AV receiver  → results in unacceptable lag.
  • The taotronic device  → results in unacceptable lag.
  • Not sure if I tried the Heos speaker, but if I did it wasn't acceptable.
• A 2.4 GHz audio transmitter/receiver kit. Due to my local postal services losing the package so I had to reorder it, I ended up having to wait 3 months before I could try this. So when it finally arrived, I was really disappointed to find out that it sucked. While there really is no noticeable lag, the audio qualtiy is extremely unreliable (crackles, pops and stuttering/drops). I obviously didn't expect the claimed range of 50m to be realistic, but even at less than 2m there is quite a bit of interference. It has 16 channels so I was hoping that at least one of them would be OK, but "sort of acceptable" is the best it gets, which requires cycling through the channels for a while every time I use it. I turned off the 2.4GHz band of the Wifi AP that's in my TV cabinet to reduce interference, but that didn't seem to make any difference.

Fortunately, I got a refund for everything except the 2.4GHz set (I can't return it because of Covid-19, and even if I could the shipping would be prohibitively expensive) and I was even allowed to keep one the Taotronics devices. But I would really like to find a solution now that just works. It seems really absurd that I would have to spend 100s of Euros on professional PA equipment just to get my audio across a 2m gap with a reasonable amount of lag (let's say <50ms). The audio quality also doesn't have to be audiophile grade, since I doubt the quest produces such great quality anyway (especially since the quality of songs from bsaber is often questionable). It really baffles me that it is kind of possible to stream both audio AND video from a PC to a quest wirelessly while gaming, but impossible to stream just audio from the quest without lag. Does anyone know an affordable way to achieve my goal? I may try to use something like this:

https://www.fiio.com/btr3, given that I have confirmed that the TaoTronics BT transmitter can send audio with very little lag, just not receive it. But then again, I know my AV receiver can receive audio with very little lag, just not from the taotronic tranmitter, so it really is a matter of how nicely the transmitter and sender play together.

[alan.nikola.newton]

I solved the problem by ordering the Fiio BTR1K. Using it with the charger plugged in causes a hum when I turn up the volume on my AV receiver, but fortunately it has a battery so I can unplug it when in use.

 

If anyone ever has the same problem, this is the solution:

1. Strap a TaoTronics bluetooth transmitter to the quest (you can use velcro to make it easily detachable for charging).
2. Send the audio to a Fiio headphone amp (I use a BTR1K) that is hooked up to a receiver.
3. Done!

[TheMattexD]

Have you tried to play Beat Saber on a pc using Virtual desktop to stream it to your headset. And then have your computer and audio hooked up to your Marantz via HDMI?