I need a USB bluetooth dongle for audio from a desktop PC.

Will any of the £1 ones off ebay be decent or is it worth paying more?

If its for audio does it mean the better ones will sound better or is that the realm of digital hifi nonesense?

I got one of these 99p ones the other day:

V2.0 Bluetooth 3Mbps USB

However it didn’t come with drivers so I used Bluetooth Driver Installer which got it working.

Since they use digital signals I don’t think there would be any audio difference between cheap ones and expensive ones. It will either receive a series of zeros and ones or it won’t.

Any security issues / differences between cheap and expensive?

If it’s for streaming audio, it needs to support the A2DP profile. Not all of them do.

I don’t think there would be any audio difference between cheap ones and expensive ones. It will either receive a series of zeros and ones or it won’t.

Bluetooth is a suite of protocols. As I said just now, A2DP is the stereo audio one. It knows that it’s audio rather than ‘data’ in the strictest sense, so is subject to lossy compression. As far as I’m aware though, there won’t be any difference between a cheap and an expensive dongle; it’s incorrect to say that “bluetooth is bluetooth and they’re all the same” but, AFAIK, it is correct to say that A2DP is A2DP.

In practical terms, I’ve never noticed a great loss in quality streaming over BT, but I expect the directional power cable brigade would have kittens.

The vast majority of them used to come with exactly the same software. I presume nowadays the drivers are part of Windows, so I’d just go for a cheap one unless you need it to be a certain shape or something.