The curious case of the disconnecting Logitech G930 headset.

Model:  Lady Fosta

Yeah yeah I know this technically isn't photography related but I'm gonna talk about it anyways.  If it helps, I like to listen to music/streaming audio while I edit so in a round about way it's related.  So there!  :P

I own a few pairs of headphones (you can see my Sennheiser's on the lovely Lady Fosta on the left there), but the ones I like to use with my computer are my Logitech G930's.  While they don't have the clarity of my Sennheiser cans they have one very big advantage:  THEY'RE WIRELESS!  It may sound like a dumb reason to love them but having one less cable getting in the way makes a world of difference sometimes.  Besides, I have to really strain to hear the difference between them to be honest, but I chalk that up to me just getting older.  :D

Thing is though for the longest time the headphones drove me up a wall.  When I first bought them they worked great but after a while they started acting weird.  If you own a pair of them you probably already know what I'm talking about here.  Every so often and for no apparent reason the audio will cut out for a second or three.  I really thought I broke the things at first:  Once I had accidentally bumped into the USB transceiver and slightly bent the plug on it.  Another time I pulled a stupid and partially dunked the ear cup with the charge port in a dish of water (don't ask... :D ).  When I couldn't get them to stop cutting out every so often I gave up and chalked it up to my own stupidity and clumsiness.

Call it morbid curiosity but lately I wanted to see just why they were cutting out every so often, mainly since when they work they are an awesome pair of headphones!

Since I bent the USB plug on the transceiver I figured that'd be the best place to start, so I ripped it open to see if there was any broken traces on the PCB.  Nope, not a one!  Scratch that off the list.

Next I opened up the cans themselves, starting with the business end that contains the USB charging port.  I was mainly looking for corrosion from the quick aquatic adventure that cup underwent, but I couldn't find any visible trace that water had actually made it into the casing.  Nothing looked out of the ordinary either; no cold solder traces, no apparent shorted components.. nothing!  It looked fine (of course that doesn't mean that one of the chips wasn't shorted internally, but since the things were off when they got wet, and they worked fine except for the sporadic disconnecting issue, I doubted anything like that was wrong).

Since I hit a dead-end there I figured that maybe it was the LiPo battery failing.  I did notice that the battery wasn't lasting as long as it was before, but given that they were two years old that's normal really.  I went ahead and ordered a new replacement battery but as I was goofing around with the headset afterwards I noticed that when the audio would cut out the headset never turned off...

At this point I started digging around online to see if I could find an answer.  Pretty much the consensus is that it's an *interference problem* since the headset works on the 2.4Ghz band.  For you non-geeks, that means things like cordless phones, wireless routers, etc, could interfere with it, causing the audio to drop out.  In all the information I found the general answer was that there was no way to fix the problem because Logitech was a bunch of cretins and didn't take something as simple as interference from a wireless router in consideration and there is no way to resolve the problem...

....or is there?  :D

One solution I read was to change the channel on your wireless router to channel 1 and that seems to help, but let's get real here.  I wouldn't just have to change MY router to channel 1, I'd have to ask all my neighbors to change their routers too since radio waves don't exactly stop at the walls.

Obviously since I'm writing about it I must have found a solution, no?  If you found this blog post because you were looking for a fix for your G930 headset, this is the info you've been looking for.  Now just because it worked for me doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for you too, but you've got nothing to lose trying it.  It's one of those things that glaringly obvious when you point it out but I've yet to see anyone mention this.

All you have to do is re-pair the headset to the transceiver.  :)

Do the following:

1. If the transceiver isn't already plugged into your computer, plug it in now.  Don't use the USB puck/extension thingy though.  Plug it directly into a USB port on your computer.
2. Turn on the headset.
3. Wait a moment for the headset to link with the transceiver.
4. Get a pin or any other thin pointy implement.
5. If you look at the transceiver, just above the green LED light there's a pinhole switch.  Press the switch with your pointy thing.  The green LED will start blinking fast.
6. Wait between 15-20 seconds.
7. Near the USB charging port on the headset you'll find another pinhole switch.  Press it and the led light on the transceiver will blink slow again.

That's it!

Since doing this last Saturday I've used them for four days without a single hiccup or droput.  On a side note, because of the length of the cable on it, I have noticed that the hockey puck/USB extension/charging cable can cause some issues with the transceiver.  So unless you absolutely need it it's best just to plug the transceiver into a USB port on your computer.  Instead of using a USB port up to charge the headset though, go to Walgreens and pick up a "Tech & Go" 2.1A USB wall wart for $15 and plug the puck into that instead.  Heck you could get away with the $8 1A version of the charger but the 2.1A version will charge the headset faster and it's only a paultry $15.