Convert Wired Redragon Hylas H260 into wireless headphones + upgrade the system inside to make the built in speakers and microphone sound amazing than before.

Welcome @airlan

This is going to be disappointing In all honesty this is one of those things that while theoretically technically possible, it is unlikely to be financially viable.

To explain.

You're talking about using the shell as a donor body. Which means replacing the drivers, microphone capsule and inner electronics AND adding a LiPo battery + charge port to make it all work.

I don't have this headset but I've owned quite a few at this sort of price point (and even some more expensive ones). The construction is typically welded plastic which means that opening the driver enclosures is usually destructive. You probably could cut them open with a Dremel rotary tool but then there's the issue of getting them back together.

But let's assume that can be done.

Now we hit the issue of the internal construction which is invariably short of space - plastic is expensive at this price point so they less they can get away with the better. That means that voids (where we could put stuff) are limited.

And beyond that there are a bunch of other problems I won't waste everyone's time explaining.

TL;DR

I know this isn't what you wanted to hear but you could salvage some parts from a "dead" one - primarily the headband and position adjustments and make a new headset with a 3D printer and replacement drivers, etc.

The cost (including drivers, a Bluetooth adaptor, etc.) could be prohibitive too.

I note you said you were happy with the headset (I'm assuming you're a gamer) but the drivers in a headset like that are nowhere close to being good enough to give you HRTF 5.1 or 7.1 (despite what the manufacturers claim).

I replaced my own recording 'phones with a set for (an eye watering £150) for Beyerdynamic 990s and I've never "listened" back.

I can hear positional Dolby and DTS HRTF positional audio - with detail including height on movies - and games are "live mixed" so they tend to be better!

Our ears (and I'm pretty ancient now, so my hearing isn't anything like as good as it might be) so if I can hear that, I expect you would be able to too.

But wait, there's more. A wireless headset has a small amount of delay before the audio is rendered and that, perhaps not-intuitively, that does affect how you hear positional audio and in fast-paced shooters, you most certainly do want that.

"Hang on, I don't want to spend £150 on some headphones!"

As a game of old, see people spending silly money on high-falutin' Core i9 Extremes, 144Hz, curvy widescreen monitors, super-duper chairs and then £35 on a headset because "it's only a headset".

Only that's a huge fallacy.

To understand why this matters, try popping something like cotton wool (NOT a bud!!!) in your ears. Toilet paper works too but you'll look weird walking around with a huge piece of toilet paper hanging out of each ear! 🙂 The idea here is to dull down your hearing in the real world.

Now take a walk around somewhere like a shopping centre (don't try this when you're near a road, we don't want any accidents). Note how difficult it is to hear positional cues?

This is because positional information "lives" in the upper frequency bands (due to the way sound waves propagate through air). By blocking your ear canal a little you kill off that information and your brain loses a huge amount of information that you (and I) take for granted.

This is where designs like the Beyerdyanmics are so sought after and beloved. Unlike the typical cheap and nasty drivers we find in entry-level (and honestly even fairly pricey) headsets are not capable of accurately reproducing the sound. Some (Beats for example) are TUNED specifically to have an enhanced bass response. Which is great for music since it acts like a "loudness" control (at least like a free bass boost, "true" loudness boosts H/F too).

But it also means that the reproduction is highly inaccurate - and when that is the case you can forget any hope of accurate positional information.

TL;CBAR

Bottom line that headset is as good as it's ever going to be. It's made to fit a price point (always be leery of something that has "go faster LEDs in the design" because you're paying for that and that means less money goes into other areas.

It is possible to get wireless headsets with microphones that should be reasonably good (Bose for example) but the Bluetooth lag cannot be overcome unless the game is aware and can adjust the rendering to match. Not something I've come across but it's theoretically possible.

And now to really bake your noodle:

If you need an more proof of this, if you have an external audio renderer for your television you might note there is a "delay" function, usually calibrated in millseconds which can adjust tweak the sound and video so they match up. I've shown experimentally (as have others) that if we slip that delay off a little so we can see an actors mouth movements are not in sync with the speech, that within a few days our brains adjust the offset so things appear correct.

There we are worrying abut the "ping" delay in a fast-moving online game (or that vitally important frame rate) and totally overlooking what our brains are doing. Reactions are a factor and people with a faster frame rate have a significant advantage but positional audio can deliver positional clues for things outside of the field of view.

A similar experiment was done (1950s I think) where a researcher wore glasses that made everything upside down. Within weeks his brain learned to process the false information and reverted everything to normal. Until he took the glasses off...

Brains are amazing, but as a neuroscientist or neuropsychologist would tell you, you're living in a memory. Your entire world (mine too) are creations of sensory input that's assembled - in real time - by our brains and presented as the world around us.

But (wait for it) that takes time and since vision is so complex, our brain has to process what we see and hold the audio back until it's all lined up. In essence, we live a few fractions of second behind real time.