The Future of Wireless Gaming Audio

It’s easy to take wireless technologies for granted. After all, transmission without cables has been with us since the birth of radio communications at the very end of the 19th century, and developed rapidly over the next 100 years. Bluetooth emerged at the very end of the 20th century as several companies, all working individually to develop short range radio data communications, came together to form a “Special Interest Group” (SIG), realizing that collaboration would be the most effective way to ensure compatibility between a wide variety of equipment that needed to be connected.

As a broad-based standard, Bluetooth was necessarily something of a “jack of all trades” wrapped up in a set of well-balanced compromises, which is why – despite its huge success and many advantages – it’s not suitable for every wireless function. For some purposes, higher bandwidth is needed; or more robust security protocols; or lower power consumption.

For wireless gaming audio, there are several factors which need to be accommodated. The most significant is the need to minimize latency in the audio chain – the lag between the explosion you see on screen and hearing the resulting sound. To send audio wirelessly to a headset, for example, requires the data to be compressed into a format for transmission, sent, received, checked, uncompressed, converted back to an analogue waveform and delivered to the headset speaker system. Well-tuned Bluetooth Classic connections take up to 200ms to carry out this task, which introduces a jarring and unacceptable delay between what you see on screen and what you hear in your headset; in fact, any delay of more than 40ms will be increasingly noticeable.

Reducing delay calls for custom technologies

For this reason, EPOS uses a variety of customized wireless technologies that better serve the needs of gamers than basic Bluetooth audio. The GSP 370, for example, uses a specially tuned, ultra-low latency connection that is also very power efficient at the headset end, giving rise to an exceptional 100-hour battery life. The GSP 670 also features a customized low latency connection, but adds in Bluetooth compatibility for linking to other devices such as a phone or tablet – a solution chosen to suit the requirements of the gamer who needs to be connected at all times and doesn’t want to remove a headset to take or make a phone call.

If you add miniaturization to the challenges, then the bar is set even higher. The GTW 270 Hybrid gaming earbuds also feature a dedicated low-latency connection from game to earbuds that utilizes EPOS LL technology, whilst also offering the alternative of a standard Bluetooth audio connection for non-gaming purposes.