New headphones - need help

[TrueRevan]

Hi, I wanted to ask for an advice on new headphones. I need Wireless, with great ANC, mic good enough for communication during game, durable (I want to use them for many years). I was thinking about Sony WH-1000XM4, because I've heard Sony has best ANC, but then I saw Bose 700 are much better in this regard. Some other suggestions or should I take Bose?

[Alvin853]

Usually you don't want bluetooth headphones for gaming. Bluetooth adds delay, and the moment you use the mic on the headphones, it switches to a different audio profile which has terrible sound quality because it's optimized for calls, not for game sounds. If you do want bluetooth headphones, do yourself a favor and get a separate microphone for anything that's not just phone calls. Which is why all the wireless gaming headsets come with a proprietary 2.4GHz dongle, for example JBL Quantum 800. 

 

The Bose 700 are really good headphones for consuming media, like music or videos, but as I said I would not recommend using them for gaming because of the delay you will experience between what you see on screen and what you hear on the headphones.

Disclaimer: I haven't used the Bose 700 yet, but I have tested several other Bluetooth headphones and the problems I described are consistent across all devices no matter what model or manufacturer. So unless Bose got some magic chips on their 700, I'd expect to encounter the same issues.

[TrueRevan]

Ok, so are there any wireless headphones with low delay and very good ANC, e.g. those JBLs (I really need that unfortunately)? I can buy separate mic.

Edited August 13, 2021 by TrueRevan

[Alvin853]

17 minutes ago, TrueRevan said:

Ok, so are there any wireless headphones with low delay and good ANC (I really need that unfortunately)? I can buy separate mic.

It becomes tricky at that point, ANC seems to be mostly restricted to Bluetooth headphones (because ANC is most useful outdoors, and all devices you bring outdoors are Bluetooth), and all Bluetooth devices have some kind of latency/delay. You can try searching for "AptX LL" which is a special low latency mode for Bluetooth devices, but only few models with AptX LL are available, mostly Sennheiser, beyerdynamic, and some more niche manufacturers.

Also your device needs to support AptX LL, so you'll need a special bluetooth dongle on your PC or whatever device you plan to game on. 

 

Or you try finding ANC headphones that do support a 2.4 GHz wireless, like the JBL Quantum 800 I mentioned above, or Sennheiser MB 660, but either way your choices will be very limited.

 

Edit: The advantage of having a 2.4 GHz wireless headset is that you can use the built in mic with no issues. With any bluetooth headset you'll want to use a separate mic for gaming.

[TrueRevan]

Ok, thank you very much. I will try to find some 2.4 GHz ones.

[Alvin853]

Basically it's a game of "Pick two":

• good ANC
• low latency
• wireless

Headphones with good ANC (mostly Bluetooth) won't give you low latency, and most 2.4 GHz headphones with low latency don't have very good ANC or none at all. You can use the Bose 700 in wired mode, then you have good ANC and low latency, but no longer wireless.

 

If you have the opportunity to get the Bose 700 with a free return policy, you could try them and figure out for yourself how bad the latency is, maybe it's not a problem for your use case, I have no problems using my bluetooth headphones in MMOs, but for any shooter the latency is just too much for me.