Hacker News Reader

Comment by oramit | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised he didn't mention anything about bluetooth pairing and general ease of use. I have a Sony MDR-100 which is a great middle of the road (price/quality) wireless headset. The biggest gripe I have with it is pairing/connecting to my web of devices and music quality. This is one area that Apple routinely gets right. Bluetooth just works better on Apple devices. I can connect the headset to my windows laptop, play some music, and it will come through muddled. I then switch over to my Macbook Pro and the same music will come through noticeably better. I'm not sure if the Apple Bluetooth drivers are just that much better or if the built in Windows ones are that much worse?

View on HN

This is probably a result of the headphones being connected in headset mode, meaning the microphone is enabled. On Windows when you pair headphones which have a built in microphone you'll usually see two devices connected in the audio switcher, one for the headphones in headset mode and another for the headphones in listening mode only. Headset mode switches to the highly compressed SBC codec so it can transmit both input and output, but listening mode will usually switch to a less compressed codec like AptX, depending on your Windows device. Try pairing again and clicking on the volume button in the systray and see if you have another option for the headphones to switch to.

I just tried this out after getting off a call and it totally worked. Thank you!

I honestly thought the Headphones vs Headset was just a bluetooth/audio bug and now I feel like a dunce for installing new audio codecs to fix this issue when it was right in front of me the whole time. Sigh.

I've had this problem on Mac. In my case a pair of AirPods sounded really muddy and low quality. macOS was setting them up as the output AND input audio device. The two-way Bluetooth communication eats more bandwidth, hence the lower quality. The solution was to set the audio input to something other than the AirPods.

Try setting your audio input to something other than the headset on the Windows machine.

I honestly don’t understand how this is still an issue with Bluetooth devices in 2020. Why is there no lossless duplex audio profile / codec available at this point?

Because transmitting and processing that data takes too much energy, pretty much. We have the tech to stream lossless equality audio with latencies in the milliseconds, but it takes too much power.

Thanks for the hint. I have tried everything else I could think of the improve the audio quality but not this one. I'll give it a go this afternoon!

> I'm surprised he didn't mention anything about bluetooth pairing and general ease of use.

Gruber is writing primarily for people who are familiar with Apple's products. That they pair easily with multiple Apple devices is assumed based on the original AirPods. I suspect if there was any regression he'd have mentioned it.

Yea honestly to me the only reason to get these is seamless bluetooth integration Apple gives.

As long as sound quality is top of class (which they appear to be) then to some extent the thing comes out to "is better pairing experience worth a $200-300 premium over something like Sony MX4s?" For now, I will stick to my MX4s ($280) until maybe Max's come down in price.

> This is one area that Apple routinely gets right. Bluetooth just works better on Apple devices.

that really is not accurate. macbooks are notoriously terrible with bluetooth. with my macbook pro, it is impossible to play music on a bluetooth speaker, as it starts stuttering within seconds of use. this is a common problem over many years, and there's a litany of solutions on the forums, most of which don't work. another common problem is iTunes automatically opening and even playing when bluetooth headphones connect. in many cases, there's no way to prevent it. in my case, the only thing that stopped it was renaming iTunes, which required a lot of ceremony to even do. it seems in zoom meetings, it's always the people with airpods that are having audio trouble. i thought it was well known that apple has terrible bluetooth, at least on their macbooks.

> Bluetooth just works better on Apple devices

My experience with Bluetooth headphones are Airpods 1, 2, and my Senneheiser Momentums.

I think I can count on one hand how many times the Sennheisers needed a re-pairing, and that's using them pretty much every work day. The Airpods are far from reliable. I use them for running 3x a week, and I probably have to re-pair them once a month. This has been consistent with the 1 and 2.

However, this is due to what Apple is trying to do. The Sennheisers just pairs and plays music. The AirPods are detecting what ear they're in, connecting when in the ear, tapping, Siri, etc. There are much more opportunities for failure with the AirPods.

I'm totally uninformed when it comes to Bluetooth audio. Is BT transmitting full "resolution" audio, or is undesireable compression being done? Does Apple have better control over that? Is it generally just better to use a wired connection?

Bluetooth is transmitting crudely compressed audio. There is a proprietary aptX codec which aims to make Bluetooth compression suck less, which Apple devices do not support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AptX

Apple devices support AAC over Bluetooth. AAC is license free, aptX is a Qualcomm codec.

There is lossy compression. There is a rather old codec (SBC) at a few different bit-rates, and a couple newer better codecs from the last 10 years (aptX, AAC, ?). Apple does have the control to make sure better codecs are supported and used. It can be pretty hard to determine and control what codecs are supported and which one is used, this is almost always hidden and never mentioned anywhere.

Not entirely true.

Most audio you listen to on a mobile device is compressed already is not extracted and compressed a second time.

> Apple does have the control to make sure better codecs are supported and used. It can be pretty hard to determine and control what codecs are supported and which one is used, this is almost always hidden and never mentioned anywhere.

Nonsense. Few developers want to add the complexity of shipping and supporting their own audio decompression inside their app so they just use the ones Apple supports.

There are exceptions, FLAC for example isn't supported by Apple, but I believe FLAC takes too much bandwidth to work over BT regardless.

Lossy compression, lots of different codecs with differing qualities and compatibilities. However, Shure Aonic 50 BT sound quality for me was phenomenally good (though they were uncomfortable to wear)... most other headphones I've tried have been mildly tolerable to terrible.

Apple's BT does not apply any additional compression to compressed audio. If you are listening to an MP3 or AAC, it sends the already compressed audio over the channel so there is no quality loss. If you are listening to uncompressed audio source, I believe it's compressed before it's sent because of limits to Bluetooth bandwidth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com