YH-WL500 Ultra-High Speed Wireless Stereo Headphones From Yamaha

Yamaha has announced their Ultra High-Speed Wireless headphones, the YH-W0500.

The YH-WL500 headphones were designed in collaboration with Line 6. Featuring ultra-low latency response, and optimized for use with musical instruments, they also provide Bluetooth® support.

Designed and Optimized for Musical Instruments

Optimized for use by musicians who want to enjoy the freedom and convenience of wireless headphones while playing through any amplifier, multi-effects processor or instrument with a headphone output.

Ultra-Low Latency

Thanks to exclusive Yamaha ultra-high-speed technology, musicians experience less than four milliseconds of latency, perfectly preserving the timing and feel of their performance when practising.

Semi-Open Design

YH-WL500 headphones are exceptionally comfortable to wear, and their semi-open design greatly reduces ear fatigue, making them ideal for even the longest practice sessions.

Bluetooth® Support

Bluetooth® capabilities make it easy for players to play along with tracks in their music libraries.

Conclusions

The main USP here is the low latency aspect of the YH-WL500 and if the quoted 4ms is right, these should work very well indeed when playing live. However, Yamaha has compared these headphones with standard Bluetooth which has been illustrated as having latency as high as 200 ms. However, in reality, it has nothing to do with “Bluetooth”. It is all about the codec being used to compress and decompress the signal.

As an example let’s look at APTX Low Latency Bluetooth headphones with a portable, rechargeable APTX Low Latency transmitter. The latency in this situation can be as low as 30 ms. Which is fine for some purposes but would still demonstrate a noticeable delay when playing a musical instrument live. But, we now have Bluetooth 5.3 with the LC3 codec. This brings latency down to 5 ms and as such, there is no noticeable latency.

Headphones sporting the LC3 codec are not widely available at the time this article is published but it won’t be long before they start to appear and at much lower price points than the YH-WO500. However, it is not always about price and these new headphones from Yamaha are bound to also provide superb audio quality. And as musicians, that is what really counts.