I can't believe in that blog they use a simulated video. How hard is it Microsoft to have literally someone talking in a mic connected to two different laptops seriously.
The trick I'm using (at least on laptops, cannot do this on phones AFAICT) is to change the input device to the laptop's own microphone to get my earphones to not use HFP (Hands Free Profile) and instead stay in a better quality codec (AAC, LDAC, AptX, SBC, whatever your devices agree upon).
Sound quality for my calls on both sides improved dramatically! Since I've discovered this, I tell all my colleagues in our zoom meetings to switch microphones and it's immediately better for everyone on the call (not just the user that was using HFP).
This is because if you use the hands free profile, it'll use a codec that encodes your voice in a terribly bad bitrate, and even worse, the sound you hear in the headphones is also using a terribly low bitrate.
They should finally fix HFP (Hands Free Profile) spec as it's literally impacting call quality for billions of people.
Edit:
apparently LE audio is a thing, but device support is still terrible.
I do this same technique, but typically with external mic mounted to my desk. Another benefit beyond higher fidelity audio is that it also reduces the latency for other people to hear your audio by about 100-250ms.
The problem with this trick is that it's very important for your callers to hear you clearly, and laptop mics usually suck, and pick up fan noise.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.
For real quality improvement which is 48kHz stereo + mic, you'll also need GMAP(Gaming Audio Profile) support both on BLE adapter and headset.
I've tried multiple combinations with my WH-1000XM6 and WF-1000XM5, but nothing works stable on Windows. Linux requires hand-patching bluez and friends which also failed for me. Android does not support GMAP and just when using LE, a lot of messengers unable to detect it properly(Google Meet works, Telegram and Viber does not).
I've finally gave up on that idea. Just thinking about fact we cannot use duplex wireless audio in 2025 pisses me off so much tbh.
It's been difficult for me to find headphones with LE support. And also I've seen some of them announced support, just to remove it later because the firmware was behaving so bad.
Haven't checked in a while, so I don't know if is there something reasonable now that doesn't cost like $500 or so.
Yeah this is a dealbreaker, same with when I found out my sennheiser headphones made me have like 500ms reaction time on audio cues, I get it was an older bluetooth protocol but yeah... no, I'll stick to wired for my pc.
Oh yeah I also LOVE Teams and Meet completely breaking my mic forcing me to use some other mic because it doesn't work with the one on my headphones half the time
I haven't tried a bluetooth device in years, is pairing still godawful? I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing. I don't care if it requires the hassle of occasionally having to plug something in to pair the two devices as long as it works 100% reliably.
It's not that bad really, I haven't had a bad Bluetooth Pairing experience in years now, and I keep switching some devices ALOT (phones, headphones, keyboards, mice)
> I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing.
This is called "Out of band" (OOB) pairing and supported since Bluetooth 4 iirc, it's a method which allows key exchange using a different bearer than Bluetooth.
It's implemented quite famously on the Sony Playstation 3 and 4, where BT-pairing is done by connecting via USB and pressing the "Playstation" button.
On other Bluetooth-devices it's mostly not implemented because apart from the limited support for OOB pairing over USB on the host-device, it would require the peripherial device to also have a USB data-interface in control of the Bluetooth chipset.
So more complexity and cost, to solve a problem which barely exists anymore.
I really want BT pairing over NFC
, which my Lenovo ThinkPad II keyboard supports. On Linux. I believe a bunch of my headsets may support this too?
I think maybe there's like on one or two people who have gotten neard daemon doing Bluetooth OOB with Bluez, but it's very obscured in results or their reports have bit rotted off the net.
The worst bluetooth pairing experience is with devices featuring "quick pair" "fast pair" and similar.
The best pairing experience is with devices that have a pair button or let you hold down the power button to enter pairing mode. Although I've now ended up with headphones (Creative Zen Hybrid (Gen 2)) that have this, but also decide to just unexpectedly enter pairing mode when you disconnect all devices from it...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't NFC at one point considered the solution for such out of band pairing? I think NFC headphones are still available for sale.
Yes, I had an NFC-based speaker once, and that worked wonderfully.
You'd go up to the speaker (which you had to do anyway to turn it on), and you'd touch the phone to the NFC part. That would turn it on and pair it with this specific phone. The whole thing took less than a second.
It was great for sharing the speaker among family members, when different people used it at different times, each with their own phone.
This was in ~2015, I had a Galaxy S4 at the time, no idea whether this works with iOS or modern Android.
NFC was one possible solution for the "Out-of-Band" pairing defined in the Bluetooth spec.
The spec. allowed to exchange encryption keys with a different method than Bluetooth, Sony is using it on the Playstation to perform BT-pairing via USB.
Commercially, NFC was mostly used to initiate pairing, by having a NFC Tag on the accessory which stored the Bluetooth address, and a device scanning the tag would initiate pairing with the device directly.
The pairing itself is technically still done over Bluetooth, which is nowadays mostly a matter of confirming the operation...
AFAIK, there isn't any official USB protocol for this, and I think there really should be. Pairing has to be out-of-band to be properly secure against MITM attacks during pairing, and using USB would be such a simple way to achieve that.
Apple has a proprietary USB protocol for pairing its own wireless keyboards, trackpad and mouse, and Microsoft and Sony have proprietary protocols for their respective gamepads.
Sony supports pairing Bluetooth devices via USB since PS3 and Apple supports this since wireless peripherals with Lightning port.
However the protocols to do that are all proprietary and mutually incompatible. At least the PS3 protocol has been sufficiently reverse engineered so you can plug a DualShock 3 controller into a Steam Deck and have it just work wirelessly afterwards.
Most devices have realized pairing doesn’t need to be so hard.
Most stuff now will happily access the first thing that connects to it while in pairing mode. I have many devices that a switch my headphone pairing between with ease.
I love when I’m streaming to the stereo in the living room and my phone decides that oh no I’d prefer to listen to that on the headphones in my pocket.
I wonder how much of it is low quality adapters vs poor drivers. Whatever Bluetooth module they used in my £20 Chinesium car stereo connects quicker and works with less niggles than any other device I've tested in the last 20 years.
Yes, it's still a terrible UX. Anybody claiming otherwise is using Apple only, which still has trouble (albeit a bit less than mixed ecosystems), or stockholm syndrome.
But in general there is very little support for 5.4 from the hardware side right now. I looked into ESLs (electronic shelf labels) which should be directly supported by 5.4 but you find almost nothing. Would just be nice if one could take any manufacturer's ESLs and they would just work. Right now there is a plethora of different standards.
I wont hold my breath for 6.2 support. There are not many devs on bluez and on the kernel side.
On Hardware side the support for 5.x is not bad, Nordic Semiconductor for example is quite fast in adding support to their stack, and the updated stack is available for most (if not all) of their chipsets.
That said, even if a company which already launched its product would upgrade their stack to a newer version, it's unlikely that they would spend the money and resources to re-certify for a newer BT-version unless there's an explicit need for it. They rather treat this as a maintenance release of the existing certification...
So it might be that there are more devices with 5.4 BT-stack out there than it seems...
What’s the status of audio on modern Bluetooth? The only decent mic+audio configuration I’ve ever experienced is AirPods on apple devices, anything else sounds terrible when the microphone is activated.
But for many the audio you hear also gets degraded. Like when Windows sets it as communication device instead of headphones and it sounds like a 64kbps mp3s
I don't understand why Apple doesn't do classic Apple of creating and adopting open standards that are slightly better but so obscure that nobody else uses. It doesn't make sense that they're doing features like hearing aids instead of doing an "HSP Plus".
I found it to be a headache trying to get LE Audio to work on my Windows machine. It should provide good audio quality when the microphone is in use but:
- I have to have BLE v5.2 at least on my Windows device
- It must have isosynchronous audio support (which I believe is an optional feature in the spec)
- The headset must have the same features too.
Then it is a question of which audio codecs are supported on those 2 devices. It's quite messy to be honest.
On Linux it is even worse: there is apparently no USB dongle that would support isochronous audio and recent enough BLE versions. Only some very limited selection of newer PCIe Wi-Fi cards.
I am unsure if it's possible, it's just a really bad location for a mic. It is somewhat inevitable to pickup background noise so I suspect you would need a lot of signal processing to filter and reconstruct a decent signal.
The form factor doesn't help either, the mics are tiny. Phones have the benefit of a bit more space and a much more practical location.
I think OP is talking about the compression and bit rate, not the placement of the mic.
When the mic is turned on, many headsets go from sounding good enough to sounding absolutely horrible. Something about switching from A2DP to HFP, and sharing the bandwidth between the incoming audio and outgoing audio.
AirPods are impacted much, much less, largely I think because the AAC-ELD codec is decent, and Apple OSes switch the audio from stereo to mono when the mic is on (which seems like a no-brainer IMO, but I guess not all operating systems do this).
try to connect more than 2 devices simultaneously on your mac and "enjoy" the sound you get then. I had this problem with either intel or m* mac and it seems from a search on the Internet that it is widespread to the point that is the normal. Nowadays I only use dongles for mouse+keyboard+headset to avoid such issues, at least the usb-c ones are quite bearable on size you just need to be careful how you put your laptop in the bag, which way up.
That's just a Bluetooth capacity problem. Bluetooth isn't built for high throughput scenarios and "HD bidirectional audio" is considered high throughput in this case.
Same problem happens with a combination of earbuds and a smart watch, or headphones and a Bluetooth mouse, depending on the interference and chattiness of your devices.
Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwith to support anything better. Airpods are as far as you can push it with complete vertical stack control. The magic is in codecs and dynamic switching of them based on whether you are speaking or not.
Is it really that hard to increase the bandwidth in 2025 to get mic quality that doesn’t sound awful? Opus can be really efficient at low bitrates AFAIK.
I wish we could have really really good microphones.
The built-in iphone microphones are wonderful compared to wired and bluetooth microphones. I think there are 3 or 4 and they do a spectacular job. Why can't we have multiple microphones and do a better job.
I've had a similar experience. I avoid most Bluetooth devices as a result. I can vouch for the CMF Buds Pro 2. They're the first bt buds I've had with good noise cancelling on mic that weren't made by Apple.
Airpods have dogshit mic quality from the listener's perspective, just FYI. Everyone in the call might sound nice to your ears, but you sound horrible to everyone else.
You need to use your device's mic on video calls to have a remote chance of sounding semi decent.
Please Bluetooth devices, give me some options on how to interact with devices I've previously paired with other than "upon spotting, immediately begin playing music"
If this is happening on iOS, then your peripheral is sending a Play command upon connection. (I don't know about Android but I assume the same.) This is often desirable, but I could see why it would piss you off.
I have a pair of such wireless speakers, and experience it, and the engineers at the speaker company which the the customer support escalated me to is adamant that they do not send any such command. It stops if I change the category of the device in iOS Settings, leading me to believe the culprit is indeed Apple.
I wonder if "controller disconnected" is a combination of distance and time.
Meaning he got 25 feet away when communication stopped, then there was a delay while retries/timeout happened, and then the message when 100 feet away.
Why do you assume innovation and new frequencies are all that related. There are some things new frequencies can help with. Higher bandwidth, lower congestion, but there's also problems with penetration and range. Meanwhile, the protocol itself is packed with modes and features.
Range is a great metric to advertise. Like a cord on a tool that is 30% too short, bluetooth could air clean audio a little further. 300 feet in open air helps with field practice, yard work, etc. where transmitter is further.
I'm continually astounded at how well it works. I've forgotten my phone in the basement and walked all the way up to the third floor of a building without having the audio I was listening to on my BT earbuds drop out.
There is a 5000-page standard for Docx I used for a Word export feature. And it was mostly devoid of details and I reverse engineered Word's output files countless times to figure out the actual format. IIRC there was a single 14000-page pdf.
If I remember correctly, the entirety of the original GSM is ~9000 pages, things just got crazier (by orders of magnitude) from there.
That's comparing apples to oranges, though. Those standards also specify the interaction between network components, not just between your phone and the network.
Mobile phone standards are more like the entire RFC collection than like the 802.11 specifications.
Things are far more complicated these days vs the 90s. These specifications still seem to lack important details which you notice if you try implementing the spec.
You don't need to implement the full spec. Most devices only support the parts relevant to them. Hardware in general is very expensive though so I doubt a very long spec that helps you achieve comparability with existing devices is the thing holding you back.
If this doesn't fix the damn "audio quality goes to 10kbps if you also want a mic" I'm going to electrocute the devs responsible with the voltage common BT devices running this stack require.
Why would they fix that in the standard when Qualcomm has a proprietary solution which generates royalties revenue for them? Qualcomm would probably vote against that when it comes up in Bluetooth SIG discussions
Same goes for A2DP with a remotely decent compression algorithm which doesn't sound like crap
I'm cynical enough to believe that these obvious huge missing parts of standard Bluetooth aren't accidental. They've surely noticed.
Yeah, it's a dilemma. Modern times are no longer suitable for industry-wide standards.
Up until the 2000s, industry standardization groups were formed by companies which acknowledged that they need to team up and cooperate with each other to establish a mutual standard across several market-segments.
Nowadays we have companies who participate in those standards but don't contribute their work back to it, in hopes to secure a competitive advantage with a closed ecosystem.
What happens instead, is that they force other equally-large players to develop another proprietary standard to match them, and now the standards body is unable to find common ground between all members anymore.
Apple is the most egregious example of this, extending the Bluetooth spec in proprietary ways and not contributing any substantial implementation of it back to the standard (proprietary fast-pairing, linking BT-pairing to the Apple-ID instead of the device,...)
In today's times, Bluetooth wouldn't even be a standard. There would likely be equivalent wireless specs from Apple, Google/Qualcomm and Microsoft/Intel, none of them would work properly with each other because each team has its own set of accessories to sell...
LE Audio now has GMAP (Gaming Audio Profile) which supposedly solves the problem with HFP/HSP crap. However, almost no hardware out there seem to support it - the only one I’ve read about are some Creative earbuds (Aurvana 2, I think) with a BT-W6 dongle, and I don’t like earbuds (and dongles) so I haven’t tried those. Haven’t found any over-the-ear headset - if anyone knows of something, I would greatly appreciate any recommendations.
WH-1000XM6 should support GMAP according to reddit, however Mediatek PCIE Wi-Fi/BT combos seems have crap drivers and I was not able to make it working. And Intel ones does not work with AMD CPUs(sounds like bullshit, but it requires some Intel proprietary DSP driver to supposedly "decode LC3").
Readit News
This can already be done with LE audio, support is coming slowly.
Sound quality for my calls on both sides improved dramatically! Since I've discovered this, I tell all my colleagues in our zoom meetings to switch microphones and it's immediately better for everyone on the call (not just the user that was using HFP).
This is because if you use the hands free profile, it'll use a codec that encodes your voice in a terribly bad bitrate, and even worse, the sound you hear in the headphones is also using a terribly low bitrate.
They should finally fix HFP (Hands Free Profile) spec as it's literally impacting call quality for billions of people.
Edit: apparently LE audio is a thing, but device support is still terrible.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.
But support (on both ends) is quite rare, experimental, and needs to be explicitly enabled.
I've tried multiple combinations with my WH-1000XM6 and WF-1000XM5, but nothing works stable on Windows. Linux requires hand-patching bluez and friends which also failed for me. Android does not support GMAP and just when using LE, a lot of messengers unable to detect it properly(Google Meet works, Telegram and Viber does not).
I've finally gave up on that idea. Just thinking about fact we cannot use duplex wireless audio in 2025 pisses me off so much tbh.
Haven't checked in a while, so I don't know if is there something reasonable now that doesn't cost like $500 or so.
Oh yeah I also LOVE Teams and Meet completely breaking my mic forcing me to use some other mic because it doesn't work with the one on my headphones half the time
Any network / audio / telecoms engineer will tell you how bad of an idea this is.
It does not work at all!
> I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing.
This is called "Out of band" (OOB) pairing and supported since Bluetooth 4 iirc, it's a method which allows key exchange using a different bearer than Bluetooth.
It's implemented quite famously on the Sony Playstation 3 and 4, where BT-pairing is done by connecting via USB and pressing the "Playstation" button.
On other Bluetooth-devices it's mostly not implemented because apart from the limited support for OOB pairing over USB on the host-device, it would require the peripherial device to also have a USB data-interface in control of the Bluetooth chipset.
So more complexity and cost, to solve a problem which barely exists anymore.
I think maybe there's like on one or two people who have gotten neard daemon doing Bluetooth OOB with Bluez, but it's very obscured in results or their reports have bit rotted off the net.
The best pairing experience is with devices that have a pair button or let you hold down the power button to enter pairing mode. Although I've now ended up with headphones (Creative Zen Hybrid (Gen 2)) that have this, but also decide to just unexpectedly enter pairing mode when you disconnect all devices from it...
You'd go up to the speaker (which you had to do anyway to turn it on), and you'd touch the phone to the NFC part. That would turn it on and pair it with this specific phone. The whole thing took less than a second.
It was great for sharing the speaker among family members, when different people used it at different times, each with their own phone.
This was in ~2015, I had a Galaxy S4 at the time, no idea whether this works with iOS or modern Android.
The spec. allowed to exchange encryption keys with a different method than Bluetooth, Sony is using it on the Playstation to perform BT-pairing via USB.
Commercially, NFC was mostly used to initiate pairing, by having a NFC Tag on the accessory which stored the Bluetooth address, and a device scanning the tag would initiate pairing with the device directly.
The pairing itself is technically still done over Bluetooth, which is nowadays mostly a matter of confirming the operation...
/s
Apple has a proprietary USB protocol for pairing its own wireless keyboards, trackpad and mouse, and Microsoft and Sony have proprietary protocols for their respective gamepads.
However the protocols to do that are all proprietary and mutually incompatible. At least the PS3 protocol has been sufficiently reverse engineered so you can plug a DualShock 3 controller into a Steam Deck and have it just work wirelessly afterwards.
Most stuff now will happily access the first thing that connects to it while in pairing mode. I have many devices that a switch my headphone pairing between with ease.
But in general there is very little support for 5.4 from the hardware side right now. I looked into ESLs (electronic shelf labels) which should be directly supported by 5.4 but you find almost nothing. Would just be nice if one could take any manufacturer's ESLs and they would just work. Right now there is a plethora of different standards.
I wont hold my breath for 6.2 support. There are not many devs on bluez and on the kernel side.
That said, even if a company which already launched its product would upgrade their stack to a newer version, it's unlikely that they would spend the money and resources to re-certify for a newer BT-version unless there's an explicit need for it. They rather treat this as a maintenance release of the existing certification...
So it might be that there are more devices with 5.4 BT-stack out there than it seems...
I don't think any ear pod style mic exists that isn't completely outclassed by a mic I could pickup 2 decades ago at Walmart for $10-$20.
- I have to have BLE v5.2 at least on my Windows device - It must have isosynchronous audio support (which I believe is an optional feature in the spec)
- The headset must have the same features too.
Then it is a question of which audio codecs are supported on those 2 devices. It's quite messy to be honest.
The form factor doesn't help either, the mics are tiny. Phones have the benefit of a bit more space and a much more practical location.
When the mic is turned on, many headsets go from sounding good enough to sounding absolutely horrible. Something about switching from A2DP to HFP, and sharing the bandwidth between the incoming audio and outgoing audio.
AirPods are impacted much, much less, largely I think because the AAC-ELD codec is decent, and Apple OSes switch the audio from stereo to mono when the mic is on (which seems like a no-brainer IMO, but I guess not all operating systems do this).
Same problem happens with a combination of earbuds and a smart watch, or headphones and a Bluetooth mouse, depending on the interference and chattiness of your devices.
The built-in iphone microphones are wonderful compared to wired and bluetooth microphones. I think there are 3 or 4 and they do a spectacular job. Why can't we have multiple microphones and do a better job.
You need to use your device's mic on video calls to have a remote chance of sounding semi decent.
Last week my kid got to the bus stop before “Controller Disconnected” revealed the PS5 controller was in his backpack.
Meaning he got 25 feet away when communication stopped, then there was a delay while retries/timeout happened, and then the message when 100 feet away.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
Direct link: https://cdrdv2.intel.com/v1/dl/getContent/671200
That's actually two specs in one, both ARM64 and ARM32 are part of this.
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/?types=adopte...
...and the GSM/UMTS/LTE/NR standards are at least an order of magnitude even bigger.
That's comparing apples to oranges, though. Those standards also specify the interaction between network components, not just between your phone and the network.
Mobile phone standards are more like the entire RFC collection than like the 802.11 specifications.
Sizes like that nicely lock out newcomers from the market, as it can't be entered without a strong financial backing.
Same goes for A2DP with a remotely decent compression algorithm which doesn't sound like crap
I'm cynical enough to believe that these obvious huge missing parts of standard Bluetooth aren't accidental. They've surely noticed.
Up until the 2000s, industry standardization groups were formed by companies which acknowledged that they need to team up and cooperate with each other to establish a mutual standard across several market-segments.
Nowadays we have companies who participate in those standards but don't contribute their work back to it, in hopes to secure a competitive advantage with a closed ecosystem.
What happens instead, is that they force other equally-large players to develop another proprietary standard to match them, and now the standards body is unable to find common ground between all members anymore.
Apple is the most egregious example of this, extending the Bluetooth spec in proprietary ways and not contributing any substantial implementation of it back to the standard (proprietary fast-pairing, linking BT-pairing to the Apple-ID instead of the device,...)
In today's times, Bluetooth wouldn't even be a standard. There would likely be equivalent wireless specs from Apple, Google/Qualcomm and Microsoft/Intel, none of them would work properly with each other because each team has its own set of accessories to sell...