AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM | Hacker News Reader

AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM

jeffgeerling.com

227 pointsgeerlingguy168 comments

I will also repeat what has been said about twelve times thus far: Enabling microphone makes Bluetooth headsets turn into pure shit.

Guess what 5.0 finally allows as per spec? You can use any codec you want for telephony mode, including 44.1 stereo + 44.1 mono SBC.

Guess what Apple does not implement, and guess what every 5.0 headset I've seen so far also does not implement? Sigh. Bluetooth is 20 years old this year, and is still a fucking unmitigated trainwreck of unusabilty.

Indeed. And you ought to see the vomit the Bluetooth puts over the spectrum. "Noise resistance" my ass. It barely works even when in ideal situations (no wifi, no bt, no microwave ovens).

BT can die in a fire.

Interesting. On Windows 10, it shows a in/out "Headset (AirPods Hands-Free)" and an out only "Headphones (AirPods Audio)." So this transition would be very easy for the user to see. However, I've as yet been unable to get a straight answer on what profile the "Headphones" mode is actually using.

A2DP SBC.

Apple products that implement AAC over A2DP only do so on iOS devices (and in only limited cases), and also do not implement anything else (such as any form of AptX, or LDAC).

Oddly enough macOS supports AptX.

you can tell macOS to use AAC using an Apple tool called "Bluetooth Explorer". Also, Macs equipped with a T2 chip default to using AAC even without the manual intervention.

You can check what codec is used by alt-clicking the bluetooth icon in your menu bar and hovering over your headphones. There will a an "Active Codec" entry that shows which one is used (during playback).

Windows 10 is still a disaster. I've got to install a driver from an older Dell to enable apt-X on my XPS 9350. Codecs and licensing mean that most things will fall back to the lowest common denominator - SBC.

AirPods on Windows 10 is really a disaster, after listening for while, it will go mute randomly (then requires reconnecting), and sometimes sound doesn't match to the other side of pair, few milliseconds apart - which will again require reconnecting. Hence I had to stop using it.

This is the same for me. I also just went back to using wired headphones with my laptop. I hope that some solution comes out.

Bluetooth is equally or more universal than Wi-Fi, though. There aren’t that many connectivity standards that are present in just about every single device under the sun, including stuff like headsets and wireless mice and keyboards. It’s effectively wireless USB (from a user perspective), with all the good and the bad that that brings.

I've never had the left half of my keyboard crap out when I plugged it into a USB port.

I have never gotten both the input, and the output half of a bluetooth headset to work on Windows 10. But that's understandable, since I'm sure Microsoft is strapped for resources, and has more important things to work on - like the bricking the data in My Documents in an OS update.

Even if you don't want the microphone to work, getting sound to come out of a BT headset on Windows 10 is a struggle in itself.

I’ve never gotten input and output from a Bluetooth headset working on MacOS, either.

Just to balance the anecdotes, I've had both input and output from a Bluetooth headset work in Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10, OSX Mountain Lion through macOS Mojave, and various Linux distros.

Yes, but the very fact that this needs to be said proves how bad BT is, really. In what other connection type would it ever be stated that somebody actually managed to get it working all the way?

I use my AirPods everyday for input and output on macOS and it works fine for me.

I use my AirPods everyday for input and output on macOS and it sometimes connects, sometimes fails, sometimes I need to reboot the laptop to make it work.

The main problem with AirPods seems to be that they don't make sound because of BT failure. Apple could have missed this detail.

I have had it work on multiple hardware, software and headset combinations over the past 15 years, perhaps you just had a bad combo?

I had trouble with my Bluetooth keyboard as well, both in Linux and Windows 10. Commonly it would disconnect between keydown and keyup, so my editor would be filled with nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, etc.

My bluetooth headphones regularly disconnect from my laptop. Thankfully they have a mini stereo plug. (It's much higher quality audiothat way anyways.)

It Just Worked for me. At some point between Windows 7 and Windows 10 1809, they wrote their own Bluetooth stack. You may either want to install or uninstall your device OEM's drivers. Worst case scenario, something like BlueSoleil [1] may work [2].

1: http://www.bluesoleil.com/

2: I still hate Bluetooth.

Sound in Windows 10 is a joke at the moment. After a reboot it shows my speaker as muted, but play any audio and it happily plays through the speaker. I have to unmute it and mute it again for it to display the correct state.

My reaction to reading that this happened when the microphone was turned on was also a mental "well yeah, welcome to Bluetooth".

I have literally shifted my rating scale for crap technology completely to make room for Bluetooth to be far enough below everything else.

The nice part is a monkey brain interprets that as everything getting better, so I am generally more content with software and tech in general. So, thanks Bluetooth?

Would it be possible for the device to essentially expose itself as two devices, one stereo audio sink and one mono audio source?

I mean, yea, it's more of a pairing headache but it solves this whole class of problems without requiring cooperation from the other half of the system.

Your SoC probably only has the one BT modem so gluing on a second one might be tricky. I doubt any BT modems do this natively, but I am not familiar with the market.

IIRC Bluetooth 5.0 allows connecting to multiple speakers at the same time, no? I imagine we will see implementations become more common within a year or two?

Guess what the number one car infotainment complaint is...

I don't have a public source, but for some vehicles bluetooth problems are the number one complain OVERALL.

I wouldn't be surprised, but my frustration is a poor implementation or unintuitive implementation. Quite a few cars go into USB-mode as soon as you attach a phone--almost 100% of the time they just want to charge their phone and already have things set up via Bluetooth or the radio. iPhones won't let you play through the phone if you have an attached audio device. Some cars seem to be able to do album art and track progress via Bluetooth--most will do it via USB but not via Bluetooth, which confuses people. Few cars seem to have a play/pause button. My most recent car would crash the infotainment system when I tried to use Siri. The only way to reset things were to turn off the car--bummer for road trips.

I get why car tech lags a few years in cars, but I'm constantly surprised by how terrible it is even in high price ranges. Since stereos are no longer swappable modules in the dash, the buttons have sprawled around the console. I was driving an in-law's Mercedes over Christmas and couldn't figure out how to turn on the stereo. When I did, I couldn't tell which buttons were for the stereo, climate control, or other, more core car functions.

I have a 2017 Mini and I have all these problems. The audio clips and has other issues when played over USB, but not Bluetooth. So I have to choose between good audio and charging my phone. I’m about to buy a USB adapter that plugs into the cigarette lighter just to fix this problem.

Just as you describe, the entertainment system UI is god awful too.

Wonder if you could get one of those "USB Condoms" to be able to charge without it connecting?

http://syncstop.com/

Thank you. Combined with some other advice in this thread, I’ve settled on this one:

“PortaPow 3rd Gen Data Blocker” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QRRZ2QM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_X....

In addition to blocking the data lines, it should also provide faster charge speed.

You're better off with a dongle anyway because they almost always charge faster than the car ports.

In most cases you can use the car port and just make a custom cable that bridges the two data pins together which tells the phone to use high current charging. The car’s port’s overcurrent protection will kick in if it’s an issue but I’ve got such a cable and so far I have yet to see any issues and I’ve used it for years with hundreds of different devices. No fire yet.

My Audi has two USB ports in the driver center console: one connects to the car, the other is charge only. It’s pretty great.

I had hoped that was the case in the car I was borrowing, but all of them were data connectors (not sure what happens if you attached multiple devices).

> I'm constantly surprised by how terrible it is even in high price ranges.

Car makers don't really care. They want features on a list to check off and don't care how well they work. You can't return. The car easily after a month of frustration and realization that the car is the problem not you or your phone trying to interface with them.

Two things:

* It's probably not anyone's job to make it better [1]

* They're probably just buying the IVI module from someone else and slapping some logos on it. [2]

1: I'm misremembering or can't find a talk by Seth Godin along the lines of "everything sucks because it's no one's specific job to make it better"

2: https://www.genivi.org/compliant-products

That sounds like great support for cptskippy's point.

The Seth Godin talk is “This is broken”. Very entertaining.

https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1/up-nex...

Thank you!

That's odd because you know they spend a lot of time/money on interiors. I remember a 2001 German car I owned had terrible cupholders that broke easily(I noticed that is a lower priority for foreign cars). The next model year changed to a more sturdy design. But on the flip side, I've greatly preferred the tactile buttons on the low-end over the touch screens and menus on the high-end.

I'm confident most people care a lot about the infotainment systems. Even 10 years ago, the Millennials cared about getting their iPods to work. I had modded so many friend's cars or upgraded their head units. Their parents, boomers, just assume it's too complicated (which it is) for audio and navigation. I feel like after literally a decade they've all just given up on everything except basic Bluetooth audio (when it works out of the box).

I've ended up renting, borrowing, and test-driving (and buying) a surprising number of cars over the past 5 years and it's pretty uniformly terrible. I remember being sheepish a couple years ago when the most important thing in a new car was phone compatibility. I would have happily preached and bought something that just worked well.

> I remember a 2001 German car I owned had terrible cupholders that broke easily(I noticed that is a lower priority for foreign cars). The next model year changed to a more sturdy design.

Volkswagen Jetta?

Yep! A plastic coke bottle was just big enough to fit. When the bottle warmed and expanded, it was slightly too big and would break the flimsy cup holder. After replacing it once and having it break twice I gave up. I remember later seeing a different model year (I'm pretty sure with the same body style) where they had replaced it with a more normal cup holder.

I would also have the mirror adjustment knob on the door snag on my clothes and snap off.

You can cut the data lines in a cable and it should solve some of the issues with unwanted behaviour.

The album art and track progress I don't really care about (eyes on the road!) but via Bluetooth that's AVRCP and there's a stack of standards for people to butcher there, too.

I was wiring in a charge only USB port in my car today and found out that cutting the data lines limits the charge rate to a uselessly low rate. You need to tie the data lines together to put it in usb bc1.2 mode. Or 2.7 v on each line for 2.4 a iPhone charge or other modes. It isn’t simple. Simpler than Bluetooth, but not “hook up ground and 5v” simple.

Jeebus. Might be easier to wire in a 12V compatible USB charger in that case.

iOS devices will outright not charge if there’s just 5V on the port. Even the lowest charging current requires some sort of resistor arrangement.

Fortunately it seems like bridging the two data lines (essentially a 0 ohm resistor) is what’s needed to allow high-current charging (I think it’s 2 amps), so as long as your supply can withstand it (which pretty much every single device can, given that it’s tied to its own 5V rail which can supply many amps) you can just bridge the two pins together. Worst case scenario the overcurrent protection on the port will protect the source device.

There's a fast charge dongle for this. Portapow makes one.

Looks like there is a StarTech one too with a button to change modes - search for USB2CHADP (although currently out of stock at Amazon).

A few weeks ago, I asked for a compact rental car, but was given a 2018 or 2019 Chevrolet Equinox. It had an USB-A as well as an USB-C port. I already had Android Auto on my Pixel, so I was up and running in a few instants. I did NOT miss setting up Bluetooth or Ford's Sync thingie. Maybe there's hope at the end of the tunnel.

My Ford has Android Auto and CarPlay. And it never messes up Bluetooth if I don’t plug in ‍️. My WRX is kind of a hot mess. Plugging in never worked. It does fine with Bluetooth, usually, but when it gets confused it really shits the bed. Does not have AA or CarPlay. Is a newer car.

Often in cars (especially when traveling and there's no dock) I get a poor wired connection. I suspect it's just lint caught in the connector, but it makes wired CarPlay or USB audio very frustrating because if anyone bumps the wire the connection stops and you have to wait for the handshake to continue. It's much less of an issue with charging.

There's also the problem of wireless tech UX being difficult in general.

For example, people want the experience of turning on their devices and auto-pairing with their other devices. But headphones, for example, don't have much of a UI to manage this.

There's the hellish scenario of everyone in your car hearing the conversation you thought you were having on your back patio in private just because you walked too close to the car (happened to me). But it's not obvious how to prevent that while offering the seamless phone-to-car handoff that people may also expect.

Couldn't NFC or some other proximity-sensing tech largely solve these issues? For instance, AirPods will offer to pair with a new iPhone when they're within some fairly short range (I think around 5ft, but I don't know the specific distance) - theoretically, car stereos (and a slew of other devices, for that matter) could use a similar approach, possibly combined with NFC for pairing-on-contact.

That may very well be a good approach, though another technology has been roped into the mix.

And there's also the case where I indeed do want my headphones to pair with my iPhone that's 15m away in another room instead of the Macbook in front of me. And not my car that my girlfriend just started on the driveway 10m away. And I want to manage this from my headphones which only has two buttons and some multi-tap gestures.

The trade-offs get complex. Also, your tether idea is still something implemented per device rather than something Bluetooth as a technology can solve with some simple tweak.

In the presence of conflicts, the phone could prompt the user for audio source, then persist it in software until the next time they have a new conflict. It really seems to be an issue when you go from no streaming audio to streaming audio, from the UX perspective, so that should minimize the number of times that prompt appears. Could also solve it by the same way we solve SSID preferences: a static list of paired devices with priority orders and an accessible menu to select a specific one, and then persist that until you change your streaming state again.

Same here. My wife starts her car in our driveway, and my phone connects to it. Which leads to two issues - she has to fiddle with controls to connect to her phone, and then any audio/phone call that I was having at the time is completely lost for me until I can change it back.

And then Bluetooth is just hot garbage in environments with lots of interference - I work at a games studio so we have loads of devkits with controllers lying around, and my pretty expensive Sony Bluetooth headphones stutter like crazy unless my phone is within a foot of them.

Imagine if you connected this way: 1. turn on peripheral, 2. choose it from a UI on the device and get connected. That is easy, it is the auto-pairing bullshit that forces the software to guess using a heuristic, which guarantees it will get it wrong a non-zero amount of the time. Now that we all have N devices it will get it right 1 out of N times.

This is just terrible UX, the choice reality gave us was between auto-pairing that is frequently wrong or having to make one UI interaction. Guess which one they chose?

It is a valuable lesson, never let designers hand-wave away reality because they have a delusional vision of a magic device. Acknowledge reality and design around it instead or you will build crap.

There is that one Logitech keyboard that does this. It has a selector dial on the left where you pick which one of 3 possible devices to connect it to.

There is still the design problem there however. You kind of have to guess which one 1, 2, or 3 is. And you need the recipient device to actually be on and maintain the connection when you make the switch. So it's not just 1 UI interaction. Depending on your situation, there can be at least 3 and they're spread across multiple devices.

Ideally we'd have a standardized overlay or display on any bluetooth device to indicate its connection status and what it's paired to. But that would be its own headache and would seriously constrain how devices can look or be shaped. How much UI can you really fit on a pair of headphones that are meant to be small?

I had a 2012 VW Golf TDI. Before VW bought it back for making asthma great again, it had bluetooth issues. Out of the factory it would only play mono, the right channel specifically.

VW issued a TSB for it and the radio firmware could be updated by the dealership but it was a 3 hour process. I did it, dealership went in thinking it was 1 hour billable and were pissed that I only agreed to pay 1 hour!

Wait, the dealership gets to charge you for fixing a bug in the stock firmware? Or are they billing VW?

They got to charge me because it's labor and I had the car over a year (trim warranty).

They did not get to charge me when the DPF cracked a few thousand miles out of federal emissions warranty because dieselgate scandal already broke and I said "If you can program it to cheat, you can program it to fail"

The problem has gone on for years now, to the extent that it has seriously impacted customer satisfaction ratings and JD Power New-Vehicle Initial Quality scores. You would think that the automakers and tier-1 suppliers would devote some serious engineering resources to working with the Bluetooth SIG and mobile device manufacturers in order to improve the situation. But it seems like they don't really care. I don't get it.

I rented a car from National and drove cross country last week.

I don’t know if it was for the reason you mention (to mitigate complaints?) or just to upsell it being bundled with the satellite radio/ gps package, but I was surprised to find that Bluetooth on the infotainment console of the 2018 Camry had been completely disabled.

As in there, but all options grayed out.

An aux connection worked, but I was more frustrated by the idea of disabling basic functionality than anything.

Would they charge to use turn signals if they could?

Maybe National was tired of costumers calling them for support to fix the bluetooth link or wrecking the company ranking on review sites becouse bluetooth problems.

I dislike bluetooth. It's so much problems. But atleast it has got better since it was introduced in the late 90s(?) when I first tried it with a Ericsson headset.

It's the same UI-less problem as I experience with Chromecast. When the magic box doesnt magically work, you are stranded with no clue what to do other then reseting stuff in random order.

Sure, by spec the quality is bad... but my experience using them has been great (aside from drop outs in crowded areas). Audio and calls are clear.

AirPods aren't BT5.

Yep. OP doesn't seem to realize BT5 was only finalized in mid-2016, and iPhone / Galaxy phones didn't even get BT5 until mid-late 2017. AirPods were released in Dec 2016. Next rev of AirPods is likely going to be BT5.

I will pay upwards of $1000AUD for a headset that correctly implements the 5.0 spec with a reasonable (read: more than SBC) set of codecs. Then I've just got to find a source that can drive it...

Edit: removed incorrect stuff about the Note 9 - it's listed as Bluetooth v5.0 (LE up to 2 Mbps).

Are you sure about that? Even the S8 has 5.0

I sit corrected.

I understand the sentiment but Bluetooth started over at 4.0 — it’s got nothing to do with 3.0 and earlier it was a clean room design from Nokia that was brought to the SIG, and the SIG was told this was Bluetooth now. It’s really 4-5 years old. Not an excuse though.

I absolutely hate the terrible audio when using my Jabra Elite Active 65t to talk over VoIP. It should be crystal clear HD audio, but I have to listen to scratchy voices.

I have trouble processing audio, so it makes calls really difficult. I've started resorting to cheap earbuds to hear people for really critical calls like interviews.

What’s the reasoning on the cheap earbuds

I’ve found the jabra 65t to have better audio quality than AirPods or Bose soundsport

Me too, except android is still utter shit so, in order to take 2 calls in a row over BT, I have to disconnect the jabras between calls. Or it won't work.

This is in the year 2018, with a less than 2 year old HTC 10 phone.

No Bluetooth, no VoIP, just analog.

Another problem with Bluetooth is that most devices cater to the lowest common denominator which means even though there are ways to make it better, most devices stick to older protocols to make sure it works with old, outdated garbage.

> Bluetooth is 20 years old this year, and is still a fucking unmitigated trainwreck of unusabilty.

hear hear!

this is just perfectly stated. but why is it thus? bluetooth had such promise as an idea; where did it go wrong?

I have tried to read the BlueTooth specs a few times, never really getting anywhere, and am amazed that it all (mostly) works given the immense complexity in those standards[1]. Thus I'm not surprised that bugs like this can occur.

[1] The BT5 core spec is freely downloadable. It is a 25MB PDF with over 2800 pages. That's just the core, there are other specifications that layer on top of it.

I'm curious, to people here who are technically familiar with the standard, do you think this complexity is justified, or is it a case of an over-engineered protocol?

It has 20 years of organic growth and includes a lot of lessons learned from the initial underspecification. Lots of profiles were specified but never used (video delivery, over bluetooth, anyone?). Many were not fully thought through and had to be revised (often in nasty ways to remain backwards-compatible). Sadly backwards compatibility makes it worse and worse every year. If you go and write a stack that complies with the spec 100%, you'll find that it works with maybe 50% of devices out there.

BT 4.0 was a chance to start over, and it will help a lot, in time... BT 5.1 will likely finally bring stereo audio over BT LE, with a cleaner spec than A2DP is. But once again, until all the EDR (classic) devices out there are trashed, BT classic remains a huge pain in everyone's rear and a mandatory thing to support. How soon is that? More than 10 years from now! Why? Cars are a major BT use case and many still ship with BT 2.1 car kits. People do not replace cars as easily as headphones.

source: i work on this currently

> source: i work this currently

You have my deepest condolences. Thank you for your sacrifice.

If BT 4 is better, shouldn't BT 4 devices like the AirPods connected to BT 4 devices like modern Mac computers not have these types of weird problems? :/

In my case, AirPods + MB Pro 2013, BT just disconnects for no reason sometimes, other times it refuses to connect. And it's Apples to Apples. Considering the hefty price tag for both devices, the fact that they often fail to produce sound is shameful.

No. Bt 4 adds LE but audio doesn't go over LE yet so no improvement yet

Are you able to tell me if the codec situation (for A2DP) is as big a mess as it seems? One manufacturer is flat out lying about apt-X support, but it seems that if you want to support it you need DRM everywhere and hefty payments.

Worse

Way over-engineered. What most people don’t realize is that Bluetooth isn’t just a PHY layer, or a data decription or ‘just’ an anything - it’s everything. Who would make a spec to be 6 layers of an OSI model (only a slight exageration).

USB doesn’t really care what you send over it after a few base class types, BT does.

BT Classic is really bad in the type of designed by committee way. BT Low Energy is alright imo, but intentionally limited (no SPP, 16bit SIG approved GATTS, a 5.0 feature doesn’t “need” to fully support 5.0 in order to be called a BTLE5 device). I think the BY SIG is too big to get out of its own way.

Same. I tried to debug why does my Ford sometimes get stuck in a state where it disconnects immediately after the phone starts playing. (Then fixes itself after a few days) I've learned many protocols, but BT was the worst experience. Had to give up rather than deciphering the mess...

My bmw does the same disconnect crap with my Samsung s7. It doesn't do it with my pixel.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/blueto...

The Linux source for it is even less approachable.

Well, those are mostly just vendor specific drivers.

Actual Bluetooth kernel code can be found here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/net/bluetooth

IMO it is quite well organised and readable.

Sorry - didn't mean to suggest it's not organized and readable. More that the sheer magnitude makes it not approachable. There's a LOT going on there.

You may find value in this Mac app that disables the microphone input channel on AirPods as part of pairing them, which should in theory permanently resolve your issue:

https://c-command.com/toothfairy/

(Note that I neither know how they’re doing it nor have I tried to reverse engineer it. Works well for me in non-VMWare scenarios!)

I have Toothfairy and it is amazing as a quicker way to connect my AirPods to my Mac, but I've tried that option for disabling input and it didn't seem to work for me unfortunately. Still absolutely worth the $3 for the other features though.

The only time I’ve seen the input switching not work is if there’s another app that keeps forcibly changing the input back to the AirPods. Some games and virtual environments do that. If you contact toothfairy@c-command.com, I can look into what the issue might be on your Mac.

That’s great! This kind of app is priced perfectly for what it does. I’m going to give it a try this week, thanks for the rec!

I use an external microphone anyways, so on my Mac I never use the AirPods as an input. I do on the iPhone and iPad, but not on the Mac.

+1 for Tooth fairy. I use it to quickly switch between multiple different Bluetooth headsets when at work

I do the same thing I think, but with Hammerspoon. The script I’m using in Hammerspoon automatically switches the Input Device back to Internal Microphone when a BT device is connected. Solves the issue for all BT devices w/speakers + mic. I haven’t used it, but I’m guessing ToothFairy does the same thing, although maybe it has some more bells and whistles.

I only skimmed the article but I didn't see Bluetooth profiles mentioned:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles

It's likely switching from A2DP to HSP because the microphone is activated.

This is very common with Bluetooth headsets and it's what still makes me choose corded headsets to this day.

Newest Bluetooth reviews are supposed to have more bandwidth for high quality audio but I'm stuck with (not so) old speakers and car.

If you need wireless, it's better to go with one of those 2.4GHz receivers but they require a small USB adapter. Not really a solution for AirPods.

I know that’s what happens, but the bug is that it stays in that mode even after the VM has relinquished its claim on the microphone.

Note that this only started happening in this particular scenario after 10.14. It happens in other scenarios from time to time (that is, it stays in HSP even after the app requesting mic use is quit).

It's likely because the microphone/input channel is being activated - forcing the low-quality audio codec.

Yup, this seems to happen whenever AirPods convinces itself that it needs to use its microphone, which seems to necessitate degrading the audio quality.

Doesn't happen on iOS though, which leads me to think it must be a limitation of the Bluetooth hardware in Macs but not in iPhones and iPads?

I have seen this happen when using Siri or calling people on iOS.

All of my iOS devices are rather new, perhaps it depends on which one. I've used Siri, made calls, and spoke in channels on Discord without having it happen on my iPhones 7 and XS, and 2018 iPad. In comparison, my Macs are a 2013 Macbook Pro (running Mojave) and a Hackintosh desktop (still on High Sierra).

I’m using an iPhone SE, so it might be that it doesn’t have the necessary features to support this?

I encounter this issue with a different headset (Steelseries something or other) and both a MacBook Pro and a Lenovo something or other.

As soon as the headset is told to turn on the mic, quality drops significantly.

I figured it was by design, and using a better codec/more bandwidth whenever it could afford to, but dropping down to half that in order to run the mic channel side by side.

If I play PUBG Mobile on iOS with AirPods and activate the microphone ingame, the sound immediately turns to some weird mono channel low quality stuff. I always thought this was some kind of bug in the game, but apparently, this thread is the real answer.

I've had this happen with other Bluetooth headphones (Creative Aurvana Gold), my solution was to ctrl+click the volume icon in the menu bar and unset the headphones as Input device

Happens to my Bose QC35s quite often. Part of the issue is that the mic cannot be enabled when full quality audio is active. I guess this is a bandwidth limitation.

My issue stems from pulse audio saying that high quality mode is not available though. Common problem though. Not exclusive to AirPods.

Meh, its not really a bandwidth limitation on modern Bluetooth devices, only that it negotiates a different Bluetooth profle. The high quality stereo audio mode (A2DP) has no support for microphones in the spec and is usually highly buffered, so it switches over to the headset profile (HSP). This mode is designed for compatibility all the way back to your old Motorola Razr flip phone, so it doesn't exactly have the highest quality audio options.

If we were to really look at it as a pure bandwidth concept, Bluetooth has plenty of bandwidth to handle high-quality, low-latency, compressed audio streams between two devices. There just isn't a profile written into the spec to handle it, so there's no standard way of negotiating that between a headset and a device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles

>(A2DP) [...] is usually highly buffered, so it switches over to the headset profile (HSP).

Thanks for this information. That explains why it is reasonable to drop the audio quality.

Yup. It's really annoying to have to switch Skype back to use my internal mic every time, but not annoying enough to automate it.

Headphone jack?

Honestly I just hate Bluetooth. I've had it work really well. Been completely pleased. But I've also seen a never-ending raft of this crap. I just don't want to bother. I'll take the wire thanks

I prefer wires in almost every situation (just upgraded to a 16 port switch because I have enough wired devices in the house for it now), especially for audio... but in this case I’m in meetings a lot, I listen to songs sometimes in between, and I move around my office quite a bit. I struggled with a decent USB headset for a while, but after five or so times almost breaking my computer from moving my arm and catching the cord (thus yanking the computer off the desk), I started a journey down the path of many different Bluetooth options.

Yeah. I have some bluetooth gear. I so very rarely use it, but like you, there are times, right?

I just do not expect much. If it pairs and does anything, cool. Get it done, ditch it quick. When it works well? Total fucking bonus!

I have that gear due to a couple well meant gifts. Like most things, it goes in my road bag. I have a very wide variety of bits in there accumulated over 20 some years. Can handle a ton of odd scenarios. Built it up one fucked scenario at a time. (Like a lot of us probably have)

Edit: New venture, and it is more service related. I am building up a new bag. Lots of new tools instead of bits of tech. Fun!

Every time I go to trim the fat, something comes up. Last time it was some poor tech, early in his career setting up the demo from hell for a trade show. They stuck the guy with some low grade monitor. The combination of the product graphics sub system, it's OS and that screen just would not play well with digital video, which he was equipped for.

Tech support told him analog VGA... the look on his face was hilarious! He thought he was doomed. I went to my room, got the cable and gave it to him.

"WTF?"

I said, "this is how it starts brother, good luck, and keep the cable."

(Yeah, I did replace that one. It is not over yet where analog video is concerned. Soon though. Soon, I keep saying...)

That road bag goes to shows and other engagements where who knows? Worth carrying it.

A lighter version exists in my back pack. Mostly adapters, other bits. Lean and mean. I am mobile enough to warrant some kit or other.

Blutooth has saved my ass a few times. Both kits have a couple basic Blutooth devices, and some USB ones too.

To me, it is like that VGA cable, or odd gender changer, or dongle, USB device, world power brick with tips, etc. An option, and sometimes a welcome one, but not a daily driver.

My dailies are super simple, very robust, ultra low hassle. I just do not have the time and energy. Save that for the tough gigs.

I'll be very sad when analog video dies - I've just been fighting with getting the Nintendo Switch to output via an unofficial dock (because the official one is too big to travel with).

Me too.

In terms of general use, digital is nice. Movies, my laptop and phone screens.

For games and other things I like to do, analog all the way! Ideally on a CRT, and I have a couple really nice ones.

In my embedded type fun mostly hobby activity, analog is just great. It uses fewer resources, is easier, takes as little as one pin to drive a monochrome HDTV display (use the Y component input), and is generally more tolerant and or can be reasonably abused.

Yeah, I will miss it. Won't die with me for a very long time yet.

Analog audio just is not the same sort of beast. Great gear from the 70's is still entirely relevant in ways that video gear mostly isn't.

This no headphone jack thing is a major annoyance. Going digital in video has advantages. No worries. I get that, and am happy to play along. Besides, I can still do a lot of analog for my own purposes, even if that means signalling into some adapter chip or other.

So far, and some smart people could change things, but so far, digital audio to replace analog out, basically invalidates otherwise relevant gear, and offers next to nothing besides no wire in return. Gott xharge it, dongle it, pair it, configure it, just fuck it.

(One could do no wire with analog means, even optical ones in some cases)

It is a real mess for something largely transparent my whole life. Ugh... hate it.

You're game, trying to use an unofficial Dock. There's a heavy risk of your Switch entering a boot loop, effectively becoming bricked.

Uh,yes, apparently I've been very lucky. I've stopped now.

I figured I’d ask this here: my AirPods have never been what I’d call “perfect”, and I’m trying to figure out whether these are fundamental issues with AirPods or if I have a bad pair. Is it normal for AirPods to ignore double taps on them 50% of the time (it’s worse if I try to use Siri, which almost never works, and better if I try to play/pause but still not great)? My AirPods also take up to thirty seconds to switch between devices. Is this normal? Everyone I have met raves about their AirPods but for me they have simply been “passable”, at the level I’d expect from any other Bluetooth headphones.

No none of that is normal. If it were, no one would buy them or write the rave reviews you've read. What happened when you reached out to Apple Support about those issues?

Agreed with the above; my first pair (I wrote about them on my blog [1]) had terrible issues with reliability on one of my Macs. I found that the left AirPod was actually bad, and got a free replacement left earbud. Since then, they've been great.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/how-i-discovered-my-l...

Hmm, I will try this with my pair and see if I can find the issue. Thanks!

Why the accusatory tone? He's given incredible interpretive charity already, it's not an astroturfing campaign to discredit Apple.

I don't see an accusatory tone there, just an reassurance that AirPods are indeed what they're cracked up to be, and that GP has a dud because, as emphasised, millions of happy customers can't be wrong™.

I talked to a Genius in passing and was told that I need to triple tap to get it to “register correctly”, which did not help. I think I’ll actually take an appointment and complain some more and see if they can look at it with more scrutiny.

None of these symptoms are normal. I’ve had mine since they launched. On 2 or 3 occasions I’ve had some other issues, but they quickly went back to normal after doing stuff like re-pairing, or rebooting my phone.

I also find them to be incredibly slow to connect to my iPhone — frequently necessitating going into system preferences->Bluetooth on the iPhone and clicking on the AirPods before the connection finally happens ... it’s a complete mystery to me whether they will be connected when I pull my phone out and put them on at any given time (seems worse with Xs than before - though Xs seems worse generally in all network connectivity experiences for me than previous phones ...)

I find them passable as well — but frequently annoying - though I do like the design and fit a lot...

Im having kind of similiar issues. I foud out that if I last paired them to mac, they will not auto connect to iphone. But if iphone was last paired device, they will usually pair.

Also sound sonetimes go to super low volume and I have to reconnect to get volume up.

They connect back to the last manually paired device for me. If that device isn’t nearby, they won’t pair to any other device until I manually go and do it again.

Can you use the play widget on the control center? That’s how I pair mine whenever they are acting iffy. Simply 3D Touch the music/play widget. Click on the little triangle on the top right and select your AirPods. That works for me 100% of the time.

Ditto. Fast and easy, never had an issue on iPhone or iPad from control center. Have only had weird issues from time to time on the Mac.

How long does it take you to pair? I use the control center widget almost exclusively and it takes a while to connect.

Which is ironic, because when they came out and people (including myself) compared them to other wireless BT devices, we were lambasted because "Apple finally got this right - no more hoping that your Bluetooth device will pair, no waiting, it just works!".

Not so much.

I do have trouble switching between devices occasionally, but none of the other symptoms.

A dozen comments that this happens because the microphone is turned on, but nobody is asking why vagrant is turning the microphone on?

Vagrant is using VirtualBox under the hood, and presumably the default VB config is to let the VM use two-way audio, so it preemptively opens both the output and mic channel in case the VM needs it.

I have so many questions, but will not ask them because I don't think I'll like the answers.

THe answer is better defaults. Raise a bug report.

My solution/fix for this was downgrading VirtualBox back to 5.2.18; seems like something in Virtualbox 5.2.20+ seems to initialize the mic when the VM is booting. Guessing is an unintentional change since there's nothing in the changelogs specifically calling it out.

There's likely some fiddling with the VirtualBox VM settings to prevent it from occurring, but things like Test Kitchen in Chef destroy/create new VMs constantly so any changes get quickly lost.

The same with Bose QC35 II while running StarCraft II on macOS

I figure the audience is right on this site, so here's my question: for someone used to pretty decent over the ear and in-ear headphones (Sennheiser, AKG, Etymotic), are AirPods passable at least, or total trash like Apple's wired earbuds? What's the quality differential?

This is the thing I don't get about Apple. They sell $1.1K phone and include these crappy $3 earbuds in the box. Can they do better? At their production volumes and profit margins, I have no doubt. Even Samsung includes a decent pair of AKGs.

They're about the same as the normal earbuds but still way better than 3 dollar earbuds. I use them not for the quality but for the convenience when making phonecalls. Unfortunately the battery life on them is abysmal two years later. Barely lasts 10 minutes after daily use.

Never heard this before. Mine are 1yo with intensive use & easily still last hours. 2 years is a really short lifetime

Yep, happens any time the AirPods mic is activated on MacOS, has been that way since launch as far as I know. Doesn't happen on iOS. I can only assume it has something to do with the Bluetooth hardware or they would have fixed it by now.

But it usually goes back once the mic is no longer being used. And I've had it happen a few times where I take a 'continuity phone call' from my iPhone on my Mac. The AirPods switch to the low-quality call mode, I have my conversation, I hang up, and the audio quality still stays switched until I do the Audio MIDI workaround or reboot.

Most of the time that doesn't happen, though—when I hang up the audio goes back to normal mode (48 kHz). So it seems to be a weird bug with the switching that I've only ever seen on the Mac (works perfect on iOS).

They are probably getting paired with a device capable of receiving audio input (the VM itself?) and the bluetooth profile jumps from A2DP to HSP.

Similarly there’s a bug when starting the iOS simulator with certain permissions that does this to ALL Bluetooth headsets.

Go to the Hardware menu, Audio Input, and select "Built-in Microphone" as the input. Then input will never use your BT headphones.

I've found that if I ever do a Facetime call on my 2015 ESC Macbook pro, my Airpods use the same terrible quality audio channel. Very frustrating to say the least!

This happened to me in Windows on my bose qc35's when I started GTA5

I recently ran across similar issues while developing a web app, https://rap.coach , that features simultaneous audio playback and recording. A lot of people are saying that Bluetooth headsets have to go into a super-low quality mode when both playback and recording are enabled, but based on my testing it appears to be a software issue.

The issue appears when I use Rap Coach with Chrome on Android, but doesn't happen in Firefox on Android. It is very frustrating, getting better control over the audio hardware is one of the main reasons I'm going to end up building app store versions of this thing.

I've seen the same issue, and (at least in my case) it seems to be from audio being enabled on the VM and that getting passed through by Virtual Box. Something like this for your own box should solve the root cause: https://github.com/palantirnet/the-vagrant/pull/60

This happens for any bluetooth headphones on Mac. It usually means that mic was turned on.

Honestly coreaudiod is a hot mess. Every time I plug in a usb audio adapter it puts balance at 100% left channel and max volume. killall coreaudiod fixes it. I miss when Macs worked reliably.

I’ve run into this issue since owning my first Mac, circa 7 years ago. So while I don’t agree with your over generalization, I do agree that this is very bad and should be fixed once and for all!

To be fair, I've seen this happen with all my bluetooth headsets not just AirPods. The issue eventually fixes itself after the VM guest boots into an OS.

This happens to me on Parallels 10. But it only happens for like 5 seconds. Then it jumps back to normal sounding experience.

It’s Parallels 10 booting up a Windows 7 VM.

Did weird stuff like this happen with wired headphones?

Nope. The weird Bluetooth audio standards that cause these issues (the entire headset switches modes sometimes just because the microphone is switched) don't apply to wired inputs in my experience.

Unfortunately, this problem isn't _exclusive_ to AirPods though... it has happened with a few other Bluetooth headsets I've used too. I don't seem to have ever had this issue on my iPad or iPhone, though I can't run VMs on them either :)

It’s definitely a Bluetooth audio thing. I can hear mine shift into a lower quality audio when I use them for conference calls. (There’s a limited amount of bandwidth and it has to make room for bidirectional audio.)

As someone else pointed out it is not actually bandwidth problem. Reason behind this is that high quality audio streaming profile A2DP is one-way only and once mic is needed, profile is changed to bidirectional but low quality HSP. My workaround for conference calls is to use my MacBook's internal microphone instead of one of my Bluetooth headset.

I suspect that the underlying reason that the profile switch happens, though, is because of bandwidth limits. That’s what Sennheiser is telling their customers, at least.

https://sennheiseruk.happyfox.com/kb/article/175-different-b...

The real answer may be more subtle than that. Maybe there is just enough bandwidth, but using it would have an adverse effect on latency, which bidirectional use cases are more sensitive to.

Either way, the profiles were designed within constraints. They’re not arbitrary.

Yes, there are two standards for the 4 "pin" 3.5mm jack, and buttons on wired headphones are in general a gigantic hack.

Bluetooth works fine on my Linux desktop (ASUS mainboard) with Bluetooth dongle.

Discovers a secret "Vaporwave Mode", calls it a bug, not a feature. Heretic!

Back patting myself for sticking to wired, passive earphones. I ain’t got no time for debugging yet another piece of crap on top of my WiFi router, my NAS, my HTPC, and other misc. equipment that should have just f_cking worked...

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