I don’t leave my PSVR2 setup, which means every time I play (which is pretty much every day and sometimes a few times a day) I have to plug in the headset. I have had bad luck with USB ports in the past, possibly because I am old and my eyes are dim and I tend to fumble around plugging stuff in. Whatever the case, I was concerned about constantly connecting/disconnecting the PSVR2.
I figured the safest bet was to buy a short USB extension cable and leave that plugged in to the PS5 all the time. Then for bonus points I bought one of those magnetic connectors for the cable. I made sure both expansion and adapter were rated for 40 GPS.
Specifically here’re the items I bought (Amazon US links):
I was a little concerned that adding these parts to the setup would cause frame drops or tracking issues with the PSVR2 headset but I was willing to risk it.
The good news is, PSVR2 worked absolutely fine with this set up.
The bad news is, now the Pulse 3D Wireless Headphones (which connect via a dongle) started dropping audio constantly. That was unexpected.
I did some research online and the easiest solution was to move the dongle to a port on the back of the PS5 (if you haven’t seen a PS5, on the front of the system is a USB-A format port, and a USB-C format port, right next to each other. The Pulse uses the A port and the PSVR2 visor uses the C port). This mostly worked for me but now the Pulse headphones had micro-drops even when I wasn’t using PSVR2. Prior to all this they had worked flawlessly.
More researching. People said it was the magnetic connector. But more and more I saw that folks had the same issue just by using an extension cable. The best theory I read was that most cables aren’t shielded as well as the PSVR2’s ‘native’ cable so stuff was leaking out and interfering with the Pulse dongle.
See how I said “stuff” was leaking out? That’s because I know nothing. Is it EM? Magentic fields? Ectoplasm? I have no idea.
But I found a fix: Ferrite Cores. Sounds so sci-fi. But these are little gizmos that just snap onto a cable and reduce this interference. Here is the set I bought (also pictured at the top of the post):
For best results, I read, you should loop your cable twice through a ferrite core. With the above set of cores, the biggest ones are big enough to accommodate that extension cable looped through twice. Actually the fit was a little loose so I stuffed a few pieces of bamboo skewer in there to make everything snug. It looks like ass but so far it works perfectly. No more drops on the headphones and the magnetic connector makes it easy to attach/detach the visor without any fumbling.
Now that I know it works I’ll see about clipping the bamboo down some. If I get really ambitious I might take it all apart and try it without doing the loop which I think would look a lot cleaner. Maybe I’ll do some experimenting over the weekend. I also worry a tiny bit about the weight of the cable hanging out of that port though I think the fact that the loop touches the ghetto unfinished bookcase that I use as a console stand might help with that. I also used some silicon tape to tape the business end of the cable to the side of the bookcase to keep it out of the way and provide some resistance. The idea is that if someone trips over the cable, it’ll detach at the magnetic connector rather than pull the PS5 off the shelf.
Anyway that’s it. It was an easy fix after a lot of googling, so I figured I’d share.