This is not DIY - but I hope someone will find this useful anyway
And I know - the post could just as well have been posted in "Instruments and Amps" for the musicians there.
Anyway: I have been searching for an over-ear wireless headphone that could be used for practicing playing electric bass.
Wireless - because all the headphone, I've tried, conducts the noise from the wire moving over my shirt just perfectly 🙂
And no: I can't sit still - I have to move my head to switch between watching the fretboard and the sheet music.
Given that I need to hear the bass together with the music, I'm practicing to - I thereby get a setup that is very sensitive to latency.
I used to have an old (10++ years) Sennheiser wireless headphone using an old fashion FM modulation.
And that worked latency wise - but had too much noise and far to little acoustic output.
This technology is unfortunately not available anymore.
Bluetooth is out of the question - it is too slow (the theoretical 32mS minimum latency is just that: theoretical)
I then tried the Sennheiser RS175 which uses a 8 FSK modulation (not bluetooth) - no latency was documented and reviews and marketing material indicated that latency was not an issue.
It did nevertheless have an audible - and problematic - latency and after diving even deeper in the search I found a note from Sennheiser stating that the latency would be around 45mS.
I measured 48mS - and was lucky to get my money back for the headphone.
Then I had the fortune to visit the Thomann shop in Germany (mostly to window shop) - and in the headphone department I asked about this obvious lack of available products - and "Bingo": they had a TMA-2 from AIAIAI (no I am not screaming - that is the company name).
It states (or boasts if you like) a 16mS latency - and I measured 17mS, BTW.
Probably if I had the ears and playing technique of Victor Wooten playing his double thump, double pluck the latency might be audible, but for me it works now.
A note: the 48mS with the Sennheiser RS 175 could be counteracted by adjusting my playing, but that way I would have practiced something that would make the drummer in my band go mad.
Cheers, Martin
And I know - the post could just as well have been posted in "Instruments and Amps" for the musicians there.
Anyway: I have been searching for an over-ear wireless headphone that could be used for practicing playing electric bass.
Wireless - because all the headphone, I've tried, conducts the noise from the wire moving over my shirt just perfectly 🙂
And no: I can't sit still - I have to move my head to switch between watching the fretboard and the sheet music.
Given that I need to hear the bass together with the music, I'm practicing to - I thereby get a setup that is very sensitive to latency.
I used to have an old (10++ years) Sennheiser wireless headphone using an old fashion FM modulation.
And that worked latency wise - but had too much noise and far to little acoustic output.
This technology is unfortunately not available anymore.
Bluetooth is out of the question - it is too slow (the theoretical 32mS minimum latency is just that: theoretical)
I then tried the Sennheiser RS175 which uses a 8 FSK modulation (not bluetooth) - no latency was documented and reviews and marketing material indicated that latency was not an issue.
It did nevertheless have an audible - and problematic - latency and after diving even deeper in the search I found a note from Sennheiser stating that the latency would be around 45mS.
I measured 48mS - and was lucky to get my money back for the headphone.
Then I had the fortune to visit the Thomann shop in Germany (mostly to window shop) - and in the headphone department I asked about this obvious lack of available products - and "Bingo": they had a TMA-2 from AIAIAI (no I am not screaming - that is the company name).
It states (or boasts if you like) a 16mS latency - and I measured 17mS, BTW.
Probably if I had the ears and playing technique of Victor Wooten playing his double thump, double pluck the latency might be audible, but for me it works now.
A note: the 48mS with the Sennheiser RS 175 could be counteracted by adjusting my playing, but that way I would have practiced something that would make the drummer in my band go mad.
Cheers, Martin
Very interesting!
I just found this post now, months after you wrote it. Thanks!
The topic is interesting to me, because I haven't found a set of wireless headphones I can use with a guitar since my last old pair of FM headphones died, many years ago. 🙁
Many years ago, in the late 1990s, while doing preliminary R&D work for a proposed DSP-based powered loudspeaker, I made some quick and dirty measurements to see how much latency was acceptable for live playing.
I used one of my guitars, and an adjustable rack-mount digital delay device, an Alesis something-or-other. Might have been a Quadraverb.
I measured an unavoidable minimum of about 2 mS of delay, resulting, presumably, from the ADC. DAC, and internal signal buffers inside the digital delay unit. This was accounted for in subsequent measurements.
I'm very far from being the fastest guitar player on earth, but I found 10 mS of total delay to be pretty transparent (i.e. it didn't bother me, playing guitar by myself, without a click track or drummer or other musicians.)
I found that things started to "feel" weird at about 15 mS delay. The experience was almost as though I had a coating of grease on my guitar strings - my brain kept telling me that something was wrong between my fingertips and the guitar strings.
(In reality something was wrong between the guitar pickups and the loudspeaker next to my head, but my brain didn't know what to make of that artificial delay!)
At 20 mS of delay, I began to find the experience unpleasant. The guitar felt disconnected from my fingers, and the delay was adversely affecting my ability to play music.
Based on that quick set of tests, I set the initial goal of no more than 10mS latency for the device we were planning to design and build.
I'm not sure I'd be happy with 17 mS of latency from the AIAIAI(!) phones. On the one hand it's not far from the 15mS I found tolerable, but then again, spending money to buy something that is just tolerable isn't a very attractive proposition. 🙂
I wonder if bass guitar is perhaps more tolerant of delay than regular (tenor) six-string guitar, possibly because of the lower frequencies and slower attack transient from the heavier strings.
Frustrated by the uselessly large latency of all currently available wireless headphones, I've even considered DIY, ideally by finding existing FM transmitter/receiver circuit boards to simplify the design. Unfortunately, all the FM boards and RF modules I found were designed to produce slow digital serial data links. They were not designed to deal with an analogue audio signal.
As a kid, I built little one-transistor AM transmitters more than once. I've even thought about revisiting that very simple possibility. AM radio was never famous for good S/N ratio, or for wide frequency response - but if the distance between Tx and Rx is only a couple of metres, S/N may be adequate. And without having to limit RF bandwidth to less than 10 kHz, an audio frequency response to, say, 5 kHz should be achievable - and that's enough for guitar or bass practice headphones (though some purists might want to burn me at the stake for saying so.)
Whether cops would show up at my door to arrest me if I built an unlicensed 1mW AM transmitter, I don't know. 🙂
-Gnobuddy