Senheisser Bluetooth Dongle Confusion for PXC 310 BT

[rgill90]

Morning All

So I've bought a pair of Senheisser PXC 310 BT which are absolutely fantastic but now I want the Bluetooth Dongle. I'm a bit confused as to what i acutally need though. Senheisser seem to sell one for the ipod classic and one for everything else (BTD 300 and BTD 300i). Thing is tho I'm wondering whether anyone out there uses the BTD 300 with the ipod classic and if so is there any loss of functionality using this one over using the ipod specific BTD300i?

I'm asking this as I want to save myself £40 and i can think of a variety of other devices to use my with my PXC 310s (telly, xbox) so i'm wondering whether the ipod specific one is needed for the ipod or can i just use the non ipod specific one? I rather buy one dongle for everything

Cheers
Rich

 

[tino]

The BTD300 obviously takes an analogue input and transmits it over Bluetooth. I'm not entriely sure (as I'm not into iPods) but I think the BTD300i uses the digital out rather than analogue out from the iPod connector. I say I'm not entirely sure because I believe some of these dongles take the analgue output from the iPod dock connector and convert that to digital Bluetooth in the same way as the BTD300.

Just so you know, there are other manufacturers such as Creative that use similar Bluetooth apt-x codecs to stream higher quality audio to equivalently equipped apt-x headphones or Speakers. The apt-x is important because it is significantly better than the standard Bluetooth SBC codec that cheaper dongles and other Bluetooth devices use. I use an apt-x USB dongle from a PC to transmit audio to a Chordette Gem DAC.

 

[rgill90]

Thanks for the reply Tino. It was good to know about other bluetooth dongles as well.

Anyway for info and for anyone else reading this I took the plunge on a BTD 300 non ipod specific one and it works extremly well with the ipod whilst out and about. Couldn't tell the difference between the bluetooth sound and that with the supplied cable to use them wired up to the ipod. I also plugged it into a 3.5mm jack socket to 2 phono RCA adapter, plugged that into my boxee box and watched a movie with them on. Everything worked with no delay on lip sync and did an excellent job of downmixing a high def mkv file with DTS soundtrack to a spatial 2 channel. Also tried with my xbox which worked just as well with a phono coupler adapter. (obviously doesn;t work if you're playing multiplayer and need to chat to other team members)

So if there's anyone else out there with not quite the funds (or some would say as tight as me!) to buy a specific pair of headphones for portability, one for movies and seperate bluetooth dongles, the PXC 310 BTs with a BTD 300 are great to use as a jack of all trades.