I have been searching the forum, but haven’t found anything on this subject.
I would like to use my ROCK as a BT transmitter, can I connect this Dongle and chose it as an audio output?
Then have it stream to my headphones?
Br Morten
Nope I doubt it would work. Rock isn’t a standard distro and comes with very limited drivers. You could try it but no guarantees.
I don’t have experience of that exact adaptor, but looking at the description I expect it will work, albeit with some caveats.
- The standard / small / dirt-cheap USB Bluetooth adaptors don’t work as they require a BT driver that isn’t compiled into ROCK.
- However, the more expensive ones can work as they simple present themselves as a USB sound card to ROCK. In much the same way that ROCK can recognise and output to a USB DAC attached to it.
The keywords to look out for on such products is that they work for headphone use with a PS4 (like ROCK, the PS4 doesn’t have the regular BT drivers) and that it is specifically aimed (or only works with) headphones and audio devices, rather than general bluetooth accessories like keyboards and mice.
I once had a Sennheiser BTD500USB adaptor (old & not necessarily recommended) which I used with ROCK. It worked, as in it appeared as a USB DAC and output to my Bluetooth headphones in Roon. But it was pain to pair if the pairing was lost, so while it works it’s not the route I would go.
So in short, yes you can get USB Bluetooth audio adaptors that work & the device you linked to looks like it might be such a device.
But, they can be frustrating as if/when they can lose the pairing, as they tend to require you to hold down a button on the dongle, or physically unplug it.
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That all said, if you have a mobile phone, a much better option is to just pair you headphone with your phone and go that route instead.
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Thanks, it supports PS5, and Switch, hence I suppose it may work. I only have an iPhone, the dongle have other codex, I suspect it may be better…
Why don’t you just use your phone it’s will be far simpler and will work without any hassles.
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Yes, but will the adapter not have a higer bitrate than an iPhone? And a better sound quality?
Just suggesting its a far easier and more likely to work than trying to shoehorn something into ROCK that it was never intended to support. You can add on a USB BT device to the phone to get the other codecs if you have issue with AAC which is perfectly fine, all BT is lossy to some degree but then BT isnt what I would use in the house and be judging SQ on. Personally I would use a Roon Ready DAP such as the Fiio M11 Plus, I can use it with what ever headphones I want and it works around the house whatever Room i’m in as its wireless, can output wired or BT, but this is going off budget most likely. Like Jamie has suggested look for a device that is a USB sound card that then sends over BT it might work but it also might not. But what I suggest will likely be far more reliabl.
If your headphones don’t support AAC then there might be an argument for going this route, but if they do and your using an iPhone then the argument is far less clear cut.
If you’re buying the adapter from Amazon give it a go — it looks like a ‘USB sound-card’ type dongle so should work, you can always send it back if it doesn’t. If it works well, or even if doesn’t, update this post with your findings it might be useful to others.
My experience with a different adaptor, see above, was that while it worked, it was just too much hassle as I kept having to physically access the dongle to re-pair my headphones and that became frustrating.
For me the whole point of wireless headphone is convenience and if your constantly re-pairing them, then it’s not convenient.
Also worth bearing in mind that studies have shown no perceivable difference between AAC-LC 320 kbps and lossless. Even if we allow for some users with exceptional hearing, which likely excludes anyone over thirty, we’re talking small differences at the very best.
The analysis showed that there was no statistically significant difference in quality between the un-compressed signals and AAC-LC 320 kbps compression, which means participants did not perceive difference between two formats.
The test has shown how AAC encoders can preserve the quality of the original audio. This suggests that offering lossless audio might not have a great benefit in terms of quality increase to the consumers.
I have tested the adapter, it works fine but the one location where I needed it most it didn’t, so it is sent back. I would rate the sound quality as equal between the adapter and direct from the iPad as the same, strangely a bit higer from the adapter.
Br. Morten
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Yes, it would work just fine. I recently received the new Creative BT-W6 adapter which has Bluetooth 5.4. I use this connected to my NUC ROCK server with my Focal Bathys headphones and it is the ideal solution