As the message says, the PS5 doesn’t support any Bluetooth audio. It doesn’t matter if it’s made by Sony, you cannot connect audio devices to a PS5 via Bluetooth.
Ps4 does, what pepega shit is this
(It is a meme I stole I am not currently attempting to connect a headset, but I am nonetheless bothered by ps5s lack of bluetooth)
Most likely they’d have to pay royalties to use Bluetooth software on their device, and they deemed the cost too high. The same thing is true for HDMI and other things. They’re proprietary, so sometimes devices won’t support it so they don’t have to pay royalties. (Unrelated, but I honestly don’t understand how HDMI still exists though with DisplayPort being available without the licensing costs. It just controls so much of the market that it can’t die.)
why do companies want to pay royalties for hdmi when display port is better
99% of the people I know have no clue what Display Port is, while even my tech-illiterate grandparents know about HDMI.
The people you’re ultimately selling to are more important than almost anything else in the equation.
There was a point where hdmi was new too. DisplayPort is superior, it should be the new standard
When HDMI was new, none of is predecessors were even 10% as universally known as HDMI is today.
DVI, VGA, Component, Composite, a few different Coax options… it was all over the place.
It’s like trying to overtake Facebook today and arguing that there were social media sites before Facebook. Sure, but they weren’t nearly the same Goliath.
I agree it should be, but it won’t be for a while still. HDMI is still far more well known that it won’t happen quickly.
I like the physical plug for display port more too. Is it just because there isn’t some LLC pushing adoption of display port like there is for HDMI?
I can’t find anything about Bluetooth being proprietary and requiring royalty fees.
You should read the table you linked - none of those fees relate to the cost per unit because there isn’t one. Sony locked out Bluetooth to enforce profitability in their accessory market for PS5 for themselves and their partners.
Gawd damn! Thanks. That shit is not ok.
I can see that being an issue but there’s also the issue with lag/latency. Although, if somebody wants to deal with a slight audio delay I say more power to them.
Bluetooth everything is libre.
HDMI charges like 10 cents a port.
I thought the controllers were connected by bluetooth
That’s fuckin insane. I had no idea it couldn’t even do that. The crazier thing is looking it up and seeing all the fanboys defending this as actually a good thing
Crazy I didn’t know. The defender fanboys are even in this thread. Wow
It’s so that they sell more of their first party gracias Headphones
Edit: lmao I meant wireless
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It didn’t originally, but it had a bluetooth transmitter it was using for the joycons and other controllers. A system update in 2021 added bluetooth audio support. The patch noted that not every headset would work, and microphones won’t work at all, but it’s there. Go to System Settings -> Bluetooth Audio to use it. I haven’t had any problems getting stuff to connect, but I’ve also only tried pairing two things so that’s a tiny sample size. One of those has volume control that successfully sends volume up/down commands to the Switch, the other fails to adjust the volume.
The PS5 also uses bluetooth for its controllers, so they could do the same thing if they wanted.
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After Apple , Sony is the hardware tech company that I hate the most. They have always had retrograde and protectionist thinking with their products like Nintendo.Betamax x VHS war was a great example
Happy to see Sony hate. Sony was Apple before Apple.
The vita was amazing, but destroyed by the stupid proprietary memory cards that were obscenely expensive
I wonder how much of the world’s resources Sony has poured into their own proprietary formats that didn’t catch on because they kept them proprietary, from Betamax to Memory Stick.
Then again, the Xperias are pretty damn good and use stock Android without all the bloat that other manufacturers add.
New xperias are good, old xperias used to be a nightmare and made me switch to an iphone 4 back in the day
If anyone reading this is considering cheaper Sony bluetooth headphones versus the comparable Anker product, go with Anker! The speaker and a few models of headphones I’ve used were much better and cheaper than the comparable Sony product.
I’m on the Anker a3212 but I should have gone with the wi1000x: I actually wanted ambient passthrough. the difference was like 8 or 9 times the price so I’m still very happy with anker
I have Samson headphones that I notice the build/material quality is a bit nicer than Anker, I had the Life Q20 and they fell apart, but that was after something like two years of rough use, although the actual speaker and electronics work fine and holds a charge. But yeah for the price I haven’t seen any other brand perform as well.
Their professional CD audio recorders only take CDRs with special “generation bits” in some desperate stupid attempt to reduce copying even though everybody else’s CD recorders don’t care about the bit.
They invented their stupid proprietary memory sticks even though SD cards were cheaper and more readily available.
The power plugs for their devices of course are not barrel plugs so you can’t replace them with a cheap and easily available replacement.
They’re complete assholes to their customers.
I’d say the HP is at least on par with them. They’re software locking which RAM or WiFi modules you can use in their laptops and theyuse as much proprietary components as possible in their desktops and servers, just because they can. And that’s not even talking about printers…
4th place I think would go to LG, but thankfully they’re not big enough to be noticeable
To be honest, the real problem with betamax was that Sony never thought about longer tape lengths. They just designed a cartridge and then got in trouble when they had to catch up with VHS when VHS offered longer play time. People wanted to record a football game when they were away and you just couldn’t do that with early Betamax. And even later on, VHS stayed supreme in playback length. Even though video quality was never as good as Betamax. I guess this also goes to show is that most people don’t care about the quality of a device but the usability of a device. Which brings us right back and why people would want to use bluetooth audio even if it is a sub optimal experience.
All Japanese tech and adjacent companies are so extremely corporatised. Panasonic, Toshiba, Fuji, Mitsubishi etc. They protect their profits through proprietary connectors and firmware, and the overworked Japanese populace puts up with it over there. Where it’s for an international market, that’s made clear by the fact that there’s almost never a Japanese language option (see: games and other media that protects the corporations’ IP for Japanese voice actors). Living there I was always disturbed by how the government let this happen and there was no social movement to do anything about it. The zaibatsu are still in control of the country, of course.
I got legit angry at it, but it makes sense, there is a very slight but noticeable delay in almost all bluetooth audio. Sony certainly wouldn’t want to taint their brand by something that small
Boost this one to the top, it’s the official reason given by sony. You can disparage it if you want, but it has technical merit. The audio codecs supported by mainstream bluetooth devices are meant for music, where you want the highest possible quality and can tolerate a slight delay between when you press play and when the music actually starts.
In video games this means you get a noticable delay on the audio. With classic video file playback like a movie, this can be compensated for by delaying the visuals so thay match up with the audio, but delaying the visuals in a video game is an even worse experience for the player.
Sony’s use of a proprietary audio codec via their wireless controllers is pretty justified. They’re able to optimize for latency and it shows (or rather, it doesn’t, since you probably would never notice it).
That’s a very high fucking horse to be standing on top off when their device is specifically made to be plugged into a television. Y’know, the thing that almost never can display an image with less than 100 ms of latency even in “game mode”. Any decent bluetooth codec has less latency than a standard TV so that’s a bullshit excuse.
Also there are low latency bouetooth codecs like AptX-LL with less than 40ms of E2E delay. Sony could enable bluetooth for those devices if it can negociate a low latency codec. They could show a warning about how they can’t guarantee the user experience. But they won’t.
The real reason is that they want to lock their users into a walled garden where they have an effective oligopoly. It’s a very old and scummy business tactict. It’s that simple and there’s no need to regurgitate their pathetic excuses.
Thank you, I was almost feeling a tinge of sympathy for Sony then I remembered, these businesses have centuries of practice in deceit and any actual benefit that comes to users is incidental to their only actual goal of maximizing profit.
Nowadays many TVs have very low latency.
It has hypercapitalistic anti consumer merit
It’s not okay to make excuses for it
It is purely to make profit of a customer seen as incompetent
Just because it’s a valid business case for making money
Even if to prevent bad experiences on their premium product
Nothing other than a failure of the capitalist system
No need to excuse it
You know what’s worse than audio with a 0.04 ms delay? No audio. Guarantee anyone who hooks up a pair of $20 Bluetooth headphones instead of their officially licensed $150 PS5 headset isn’t gonna notice.
Bluetooth audio latency is measured in tens of milliseconds, but I get your point.
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Which one?
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I hope you made sure your system didn’t add a delay to the video to compensate for latency issues, otherwise it’s useless for gaming.
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But we’d certainly want to brand their taint for doing this to us
It’s pretty infuriating how they don’t allow to make that choice yourself. Put up a text prompt for god’s sake!
This is why I hate consoles. The only “consoles” I would use are PC-based, such as Steam Deck or self-built desktop PC with SteamOS.
This way I am not locked, games are cheaper and I can move/sync game save.
In fairness, I was using my Bluetooth headphones on my deck the other day and had to switch to external audio because the latency, slight as it was, was utterly messing with my ability to play Black Mesa.
that’s Bluetooth for ya
At least they treat you like an adult and give you the choice to use bluetooth, even if it may give you a lesser experience with latency.
I agree.
If there’s something console exclusive that I want, I just emulate it. I don’t have the best computer, so it’s still a better experience on a real console (if it’s a new game, obviously), but it’s good for trying to see if I’ll like the game or not.
Console-only players love to tell that their console is much cheaper than PC, but what they don’t tell:
- Limited amount of games.
- No emulators.
- Can’t use as PC (e.g. elderly parents, for web browsing, with M&K)
- You can’t turn your console into home server/media player.
- Can’t have mods (both game and OS).
Xbox users, when SSD fails, they can’t replace it. They have to bring it to authorized repair service for SSD change for ~$200-$300.
Playstation, if you jailbreak it AND play online - Sony will permaban your account (I have personal experience from this). Which means - I will never ever buy Sony console again.
So what I am trying to tell that consoles (xbox/ps) are basically a scam.
Handheld PCs are good way to go. The Steam Deck created the competition from different OEMs making Windows handheld PCs.
Hey, SOME console games support mods now. Skyrim in particular has console compatible mods.
I really hope someday we will have some way to transfer digital games between platforms
I agree
It’s weird because there’s a 3.5mm port on the controller you can use. Which I usually end up using, or Bluetooth through my TV. But it’s really silly that they don’t just say “Bluetooth audio sucks, use at your own risk” and let you have it.
Bluetooth does, legitimately, suck, for gaming though.
The only official two-way audio profile (that is, mic and speaker working simultaneously) mandates a low bitrate mono audio.
Stereo audio itself has a slight latency which may be fine for music or even movies (especially with lip sync adjustments), but for gaming it can be a problem when your audio is a big part of your situational awareness.
I don’t mind not supporting Bluetooth for games, at least for multiplayer. 3.5mm to controller and a proprietary protocol for the audio is the perfect compromise. For single player or media, though, I’d agree it’s dumb.
IMO even if it does suck for latency, not everyone is playing competitively and needs perfect latency and bluetooth should be supported for everything. Rhythm games on pc and mobile even have adjustment settings for terrible latency.
This is my issue with it. I have a good wired headset I plug in when I am playing online multiplayer or anything that needs good sound. I have a Bluetooth headset I use when I don’t want the hassle of wires or am listening to music and might stand up and walk around or something.
Let me have the choice and don’t treat me like an idiot for not caring about laggy audio when I’m just playing Football Manager and listening to Spotify.
Depending on the profile, it’s not just a little latency that would be slightly annoying, it can be easily half a second or more, which is enough to be disorienting even in normal slow paced gameplay.
I’m more of the camp it should warned that it is worse for gaming with an explanation of why, then just out right disallowing it. As was said, not all people are playing competitive nor does it present a problem for all games.
I (think) I have the same headphones as op. They look like the WH-CH700N’s. Decent headphones, not the fanciest. Anyway, they have a 3.5 mm port. I use them with my Roku remote all the time
they want you to buy their specific ps5 earbuds. It is absolutely inane, the tech is all there but not available. Personally my smart tv can connect to my bluetooth earbuds so I just do that
Likely this. I have to use my bose headphones wired into the controller, meanwhile, I can just pair the same headphones with my Nintendo switch without issue.
Don’t give Nintendo a free pass on that, it was years before they added support for Bluetooth audio
At least the switch still worked fine with usbc to Bluetooth adapters before the update, I actually still use mine since it has significantly less latency than the switch itself.
It’s because Sony likes making proprietary products and sucks at it.
WULFF DEN did a review on the portal and mentioned some of the other proprietary stuff that also sucked. I still have some of their garbage mem sticks and Vita charger.
I mean honestly:
A) Bluetooth spec is insane
B) Audio requires a driver write
All I’m saying is it’s not exactly “easy”, like I don’t think they’re intentionally blocking this for anti competitive reasons, I bet it’s more so cost of development, with an added benefit of driving purchases of proprietary accessories. Bluetooth is a terrible stack that’s super difficult to implement
When I first got a PS4 and tried to connect my headset to it I was told of was unsupported. After doing some digging I found that the only supported bluetooth headsets were specifically the ones that were branded as PlayStation. This wasn’t the case with the PS3, it was just a decision Sony made in order to sell their overpriced headsets.
I have a headset on my PS5 that isn’t from Sony. Just get a Bluetooth dongle. Damn, people in this thread are drowning in a glass of water.
The PS5 already have Bluetooth capabilities that are limited artificially by Sony.
The sole reason for that is greed. It is dumb as hell that you need a Bluetooth dongle on a machine that has Bluetooth in order to use a Bluetooth headset of your choice.
I know, but a dongle is very cheap and most good headsets come with dongles. It’s not super big deal. I understand it isn’t ethical but I just don’t see this preventing anyone from buying another headset they actually like.
Bluetooth has an audio delay that is detrimental to games. You can buy a dongle and use other headsets as well. There’s nothing nefarious here:
Why not put a warning when connecting a Bluetooth headset instead of outright blocking it?
I had similar, my Bluetooth headphones that I’d been using with the PS3 didn’t work on my PS4, but I think the reason given was that they didn’t support Bluetooth encryption standards or something.
Like bro, I do not care if someone eavesdrops the audio of my Kingdom Hearts session - just give me the choice
I don’t know enough about this really to speak on it, but I think if there was a problem with encryption, a person could spoof a connection to your device and get your passwords or other data maybe. There was a big data leak a few years ago from someone getting into a network through a smart fridge or similar device because of weak security standards.
If the nintendo switch can do it, so should a PS5.
The bluetooth stack for a company of this size is a solved problem.
Pretty sure the controllers connect over bluetooth already
That’s correct!
So having enough of the Bluetooth stack implemented to do a controller is very different than having the audio portions of the Bluetooth stack implemented as well. It’s not a “one and done solution”, it’s more like a big mess
Interesting! Thanks for explaining
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Because bluetooth audio playback is part of the kernel and pulseaudio/pipewire (and more) and unless sony want to run those on the ps5 (which arguably would be a bad idea at this point) that’s not really a useful analogy.
A better question is why a dedicated gaming company like nintendo could at least get some audio working while ps5 made by a much bigger and more diverse company can’t.
Arguably it’s because ps5 is a home console and audio playback is the realm of the tv or receiver/soundbar in that setting and they are more concerned with showing ads and spying on you than basic functionality nowadays…
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Bluetooth and bluetooth audio are very different things. Bluetooth audio support seem rather weak and users seem to be using usb audio blootooth dongles created for pa4 and ps5 such as https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MF5S5YX rather than a generic bluetooth transciever.
What little freebsd support for bluetooth audio there is seem to rely on specific audio backend software and since I’m assuming ps5 has surround sound, atmos and whatnot they probably threw that out of the window early on during development.
With that said sony has done plenty of graphical stuff on what I assume is their custom display driver suchas 3d, vrr, hdr. So them having plenty of custom modules on top of freebsd can’t really be an excuse so I’d just cook it down to sony priorities.
Also, fuck developing for bluetooth. Hate that janky specification…
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The biggest thing with Bluetooth audio is the codec used between the headphones and the source. The most basic is SBC which nearly everything supports, however it’s pretty low quality and high latency which makes it inappropriate for gaming.
Pretty much every other option involves licensing fees, and there’s nothing really universal. Apple’s stuff uses AAC and more recently Apple Lossless, Sony’s stuff tends to use LDAC, anyone using Qualcomm chips gets AptX sometimes in HD and lossless variants. If you don’t match on codecs, you end up on the shit-tier SBC codec, which isn’t fit for purpose here.
After licensing, they would need to write support for all these codecs into the playstation sound system and to get the latency down to an acceptable level for gaming, you might even need hardware codec chips, I’m not sure.
Bluetooth audio is the wild west, and given all the above I can’t really blame them for not supporting it
Edit: out of curiosity I had a look, there’s LHDC, LC3 & Samsung’s own one now on top of everything else
That’s not how it works. It’s not like they can just pull down FreeBSD and it comes with a driver written for whatever Bluetooth hardware they have. They still have to write the driver that actually interfaces with the hardware that Sony chose to bring into the PS5. Maybe there’s already a driver for the chip that Sony has, they could fork it and tweak it for the PS5, but honestly, they likely have a fairly proprietary setup. No off the shelf or upstream code will be able to do this.
They already implement a Bluetooth microphone via their controller
I thought the same thing when I tried to use my Sony headphones of a model that were made after the PS5 launched. They must be plugged into the controller to work, and when done that way the microphone doesn’t work making it worthless as a headset.
Literally unplayable
Sony has totally bad vertical integration. It would be so powerful for them because they produce so much stuff.
First ps5 has no games than this
Wait, really?
If it’s in a meme it must be true!
To overcome this, I got a cheap low latency USB Bluetooth adapter. BT latency is still too much.
Should’ve gotten an Xbox
Except they don’t support USB OR Bluetooth audio.
No way, not even usb!?
