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Comment by kingosticks | Hacker News Reader

So, is the problem because the adaptive feature of SBC is only one-way and once the bitpool is decreased (as you walk away from the transmitter and the signal degrades) it doesn't get increased again when the signal later improves? But turning it off and on again (while the signal condition is good) resets the high bitpool setting? And the workaround presented here is to basically disable the adaptive feature? If so, doesn't that then mean it'll start cutting out as you walk away, or is that that also switching to 'dual' mode prevents?

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An additional problem is artificially limiting the bitpool size to 53 - which for a lot of headsets is far lower than they actually support. Since this is lossy to lossy conversion (Unless your source material is lossless of course!) - you want the second encoding step to do as little as possible - so a ridiculously high bitrate is desirable. You don't necessarily have to disable the adaptive nature of the protocol if you don't want to, but for me I get acceptable (but definitely reduced) usable range with bitpool value in the 70s. YMMV :)

Turns out I actually have the H21s. I had forgotten exactly why I wasn't using them with my XPS but turns out it's because they are a nightmare getting them to connect. Once connected the audio stutters awfully but only when I type on my wired keyboard or move my bluetooth mouse. Maybe it's my laptop at fault but it all works fine under Windows. I tried following the steps in the article (just in case that helped) but it's still unusable. Shame. I'll go back to only using the H21's them with my Android phone and in Windows, both of which work flawlessly!

I had previously read a really interesting article at https://habr.com/en/post/456182/ which vaguely talked about some limits of setting the bitpool higher and that some devices didn't support it. But seeing as I have the same MPOW headset I will give this all a try - thank you very much for sharing!

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