Portable Bluetooth Transceiver

Edit: After 3 months of light use, the stereo jack has stopped working - it now only connects left or right channel (sometimes neither) - the contacts have apparently gone bad and I probably spent more time jiggling and twisting the plug than actually listening to the device. Sad to say I have to lower the device from three to two stars. Original review follows: My plan was to operate an Avantree Saturn in transmit mode on a Yamaha receiver with a Sony MDR10-RBT bluetooth headset to watch movies, play games, and listen to music, replacing a cheaper (analog) Sennheiser radio frequency headphone. I am not an audiophile but I have reasonably high expectations. I found the Saturn to be serviceable but somewhat disappointing in real usage - also, all the different types of sound quality problems make it impossible to figure out if you have set it up wrong. Here's a couple of notes on transmit mode after three days: 1) The most important thing that I found out is that the Avantree is very sensitive to high input volume at the jack. If you are having terrible sound quality - especially badly distorting bass, you need to turn down the input. You need to do as much amplification as possible with the end device, in my case the Sony headphones. However, don't turn the volume down too much, or you'll run into the low-volume audio cutout problem discussed below. Prepare to figure out this Goldilocks level for each device for each thing you plug it into. 2) Range is reasonably good, at least 20 feet if nothing is between receiver and transmitter. However, walls or closed doors in the direct path will cause dropouts. The dropouts are much worse than analog because they are basically gaps in the sound, not gradually increasing static. The signal is also sensitive to microwaves and wireless cards, so you might have a problem depending on how your electronics are set up. One time I sat next to the laptop and sound was cutting out every time I loaded a big image, but other times it was fine. 3) Even in APTX mode, watching TV or video you can notice the lack of sync between video and audio immediately. However, the delay is fairly short, and depending on the type of video you can tune it out after a while. The worst is people talking or sudden events like explosions, where the sound hits obviously after the fact. 4) Playing any quiet movie reveals that the Avantree cuts the audio signal when the input goes below a certain level, causing things like *dialogue*hiss*pop*---silence---*dialogue*hiss*pop---silence. Really bad with 2001: A Space Odyssey, or anywhere there's music-less dialogue. This is really distracting during movie watching and it really, really needs to be fixed pronto. 5) Comparing audio directly between Dell laptop direct bluetooth audio stream and Avantree bluetooth plugged into the headphone jack: Avantree quality is lower, as expected. However, the mids and vocals are still fairly good. The highs get somewhat crunchy but still ok - this makes it a little fatiguing to listen to. The bass suffers the most and sometimes it's hollow, boomy and unpleasant, but the quality is sometimes ok, varying over time depending on...what? Reception? I don't know. 6) I had terrible, terrible sound quality until I realized that the Avantree absolutely needs to be fully charged before its first use. You have enough charge to turn it on, but it will sound like crap and you'll return it as defective. Also unfortunately, there is a awful hum if you try to plug it into USB power while using it, so you can't charge and play at the same time. 7) Connection was easy once I figured out how to use the one button. Hold for two seconds to turn off, hold for a slightly longer period to turn on, hold even longer to pair. If you're turning it off the light will flash red once, if turning on the light will flash blue, and pairing it will flash purple. Once the flash happens the light goes off (unless you are charging in which case the light always stays red I think), so at first it's confusing whether you have the device on or off.