After the long and arduous wait outside the retail store, my friend finally showed up with my Playstation 3. My buddies and I were like a group of middle school boys trying to look through a peep hole into the girls’ locker room. Well, not quite, but it was an interesting night. We pulled the system out the box and proceeded to hook it up to a nice 58” HDTV. The downside to playing right out of the box was having four cables hanging from the front USB ports, as the wireless controllers had yet to be charged.

After a few days with “Resistance: Fall of Man,” the Playstation 3 was living up to the high-end console I knew it would be. We beat the game and moved on to something else. I wanted to give “Ridge Racer 7″ a go, as the series had often brought hours of enjoyment to my home during the reign of the PS2. I decided to install the game to the system to avoid long load times, and began my play. Immediately, I found an issue which I first thought was game-related. To my surprise, it turned out to be an issue with Sony’s new wireless controllers.

While racing, the controller would suddenly disconnect or experience interference for up to three seconds, which caused the car to lock in the direction it was going. Unless you were on a straight, this issue sent your car crashing into a wall. At first I thought we hadn’t charged the controllers long enough, so we kept the system on while we charged each controller individually. We started the game up with only one controller connected to see if it might have been multi-controller interference of some sort. No matter what we did, the results were the same. After testing two more controllers and three new PS3s, the issue was still occuring. Only connecting the controllers via USB “fixed” the issue; it was not a situation we were happy with, but, until we could get Sony’s answer, it had to do.

I promptly e-mailed Sony at the PS3 website. Surprisingly, they e-mailed me back within three hours requesting info on how they could get hold of me by phone. I called at the provided number (easiest for me), and the Sony reps launched an hour-long Q&A spree. After being put on hold and answering the same questions dozens of times I got the “We will call you back” response. I gave them my contact info and have not heard from them since.

It has now been just under four weeks since I phoned in. Wanting to find out what the true issue is, I kept testing different setups to see if the error kept occurring. I wanted to see if it happened to other devices such as Bluetooth headphones and a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard. With all my testing I kept getting the same disconnect issue with any Bluetooth device paired with my PS3.

After hours of head-scratching and headaches, I remembered that my Logitech Z-5450 5.1 speakers were also wireless. I wondered if those were causing the issue by adding some sort of interference and making the controllers disconnect. On this hunch, I hooked the PS3 directly to the TV for sound and turned my Logitech system off. BINGO!

The controller issue went away and everything worked perfectly. I was interested to see if it was just the back wireless speakers causing the issue. I disabled the broadcast to the rear speakers and tested out the controllers with the surround sound in 3.1 mode. The controller issue came right back. I proceeded to disconnect the subwoofer as well as the two rear speakers to see what that would bring. Back to “Ridge Racer 7,” I played for an hour and experienced no issues. With these results I figured it was just the sub causing the problem, however when I reconnected the rear speakers, the controller’s connectivity continued to be erratic.

At this juncture I decided to unplug the entire Logitech system and play the game through the TV’s speakers, as Logitech’s sub and rear speakers where causing too many errors with the controllers. This move also led me to discover that the speakers were interfering with my Wi-Fi connection to the PS3. In short, the error with the system was not a direct error with the PS3 but an error with the Bluetooth spectrum. We also found errors with the Logitech system and the built in Wi-Fi within the PS3. I don’t know how many users are routing their system through their media centers, but I would assume that other Logitech wireless systems are using the same technology and users should experience the same issues with their Playstation 3’s.

The controller issue was not apparent in all the games we tested, but games that required consistent attention to the analogue sticks, such as “Need For Speed: Carbon” and “Ridge Racer 7″ were the most obvious. In summary, it is advisable that people pay close attention to what wireless peripherals they have, as they may be a source of woe when using the PS3’s new wireless controllers.

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