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Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

I feel Bluetooth is the ever-unstable technology we have been beta testing for 2 decades. I own Quietbose QuietComfort 35 which I paid 350 USD. They are top of the line headphones and yet the bluetooth still sucks. This is not a blame on Quietbose which in fact might be one of the best product ever. After few months of use I just decided it's just less annoying to use them with the cable. BLUETOOTH STILL SUCKS!

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>I feel Bluetooth is the ever-unstable technology we have been beta testing for 2 decades.

Meanwhile I just transferred via Bluetooth some old high-school photos from an 2003 NEC flip-phone with Bluetooth v1.1 onto my 2021 OnePlus Android phone with Bluetooth v5.1 seamlessly.

And as a test, both phones managed to connect flawlessly to my shitty 2014 Fiat entertainment system and to my dad's ancient 2005 Audi entertainment system. Even my brand spanking new Sony noise cancelling bluetooth headphones from 2021 worked with that NEC flip phone from 2003. The backwards- and cross- compatibility of bluetooth is nothing but impressive.

The only bluetooth device that gave me issues were some M-Pow headphones off Amazon that I threw away after a couple of weeks due to how terrible they were and a work colleague constantly had issues with his LG Android phone because LG apparently fudged the Bluetooth firmware implementation on that phone.

Bluetooth(-devices) work okay as long there is only one main host (Laptop, Smartphone) and multiple accessoires involved ONLY for use on that host. As soon as you have several main hosts in constant use (Car, Laptop, Phone) and use the accessoires regularly on different main hosts, it becomes a nightmare. Auto (dis-)connects happening on power on/off, some devices not relinquishing their connection etc. In these configurations I've never seen it work properly, and most often it is more a source of anger than happiness.

Anecdata happened 30mins after typing that answer: I disabled BT on my Macbook while I was using a Bose Soundlink Micro BT speaker which sits at the other end of the room (because I wanted to use the built-in speaker). Now after disabling my BT on the laptop, the Bose Speaker went into nagging mode, playing "Ready to connect" in 30s intervals. Had to get my ass of the chair and manually turn it off.

I mean, what is the logic behind this. Why would I go into nagging mode and tell my user every 30s that "I am ready to connect" just because the BT device disconnected? How about you do nothing, wait 5mins, and if no other device connects you go to standby?

I think it's otherwise confusing for users to know what state the device is in. Like for example take any bluetooth device that has a blinking blue light on it. What does it mean? There's probably a cultural understanding that it means it's waiting for a connection but then again you'll find many other bluetooth devices doing it other ways.

It becomes even funnier with a dual-boot setup. My headphones think they are connected with my laptop, but either the pairing was with Linux or Windows, in which case I need to disconnect and connect again.

While I haven't personally tried it (and have since given up on BT audio in my setup), there seems to be a way to extract the pairing key from Windows and have the Linux Bluetooth stack use it (see e.g. [0]), effectively making the Windows and Linux host appear identical to the paired device.

[0]: https://brokkr.net/2015/09/26/bluetooth-dual-booting-sharing...

I can attest that this works. I did this for my headphones and keyboard/mouse until I plugged the keyboard into my work mac with the USB cable to charge. I didn’t know that Apple sees this and creates the connection via Bluetooth (Yes used a spare Magic Keyboard). I had no desire to to the whole setup again and now have a cable keyboard and a KVM setup.

Because of exactly those edge cases I'm reluctant to use wireless BT headphones. I still only buy wired headphones. Especially when on the laptop, the benefit of being wireless is barely there. Not that I wouldn't want wireless, but the drawback of that mode with BT edge cases, empty batteries etc. make me think accepting wires is just more comfortable and less of an annoyance.

That depends on your tolerance for charging for ten mins once every few days or so and reconnecting vs occasionally getting a wire tangled/under the wheel of the chair/forcibly yanked when you forget you are wearing them when you stand up.

It’s pretty 50 50 for me but the physical minimalism and not having the wire/socket wear out swung it in the end.

Actually if you put some effort in, wires become pretty manageable. I use a special technique to roll up my in-ears and a clip to hold them in-place while in my pocket. For my over-the-ear headphones I use cable-management spools to match the cable length to my usually distance on the desk.

Although I admit, I own a FiiO BTR 5 that has BT and I can plug in my in-ear wired headphones - so I occasionally have a need for wireless listening. The battery of the FiiO is 13-15h however, and I also use it for other purposes (wired external headphone preamp). Additionally, in case the battery runs flat, I can always just insert the headphones directly into the device directly as a fallback.

Oh man, so that's why my earbuds act so wonky...

That's right. Bluetooth works great in 1-to-1 and 1-to-many relationships, but not in many-to-many.

I've gotten in the habit of just always putting my devices into pairing mode when I want to use them, which seems to work OK.

I use my headphones (85h) with both my Android tablet and my Android phone (and it does work 100% of the time), so there is progress, but it's truly glacial. It's limited to two devices and they can't even play simultaneously.

The connection part is not the main issue I think. It's staying connected after reboot/power save/distance or automatically reconnecting.

Another data point: I currently use Marshall Major III wireless headphones, which are much cheaper than Bose's QC line, but I never had any problems with them (or with their predecessors, Marshall Major II, which I unfortunately lost). Of course my use case is the simplest there is: pair with phone, leave paired. But it works flawlessly, switch headphones on, headphones connected (except if BT is disabled on the phone of course).

Another data point: I have these same headphones, listening to them now in fact and they are great.

However the problem the original poster has still exists I think, when you use it across multiple devices it's annoying and I get that sound of it disconnecting and reconnecting to other devices while I am listening, so i have to find that device and turn the bluetooth off.

Case in point this afternoon when I went to listen. Connect bluetooth on my iPad, connect the headphones, iPad shows that headphones are connected, listen to music, nothing, no sound... why? Ahh, have to go on my mac, disconnect them from my mac and then boom sound starts.

It's just annoying with multiple devices and we live in a very multi-device world. I should just be able to press the device I want as a sound source and boom. It's silly to still be having this issue.

> Meanwhile I just transferred via Bluetooth some old high-school photos from an 2003 NEC flip-phone with Bluetooth v1.1 onto my 2021 OnePlus Android phone with Bluetooth v5.1 seamlessly.

With a speed of 200 kByte, barely faster than IrDA?

Seriously, the data rate of Bluetooth file transfer is atrocious.

Meh, the pictures were in VGA resolution so their size was very small so the transfer speed was not an issue. The value of the memories was more important.

Funny, same here with M-Pow!

I've read all the rants about how the Bluetooth spec is too long and complicated and hence the protocol is impossible to implement properly, but

Honestly I have so much trouble with Wi-Fi as well, it randomly won't see a network, it won't roam to 5 GHz leaving me on slow 2.4 GHz (turning on "band steering" on the router makes it even worse, it just drops completely), you check the forums, people swear that this new OS update made the range worse somehow.

Even Apple's AirDrop on which they own the whole stack is very unreliable if it will see the other device.

Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G). It just always works, flawlessly, 24/7. Even with the random crap Chinese "iFOE" Mediatek knockoff I bought once.

One job I did involved a large provider of public WiFi in the UK. As a result of this, I'm convinced that WiFi is pretty much like tech from the Warhammer 40k universe and simply will not work if the correct benedictions to the Machine God are not uttered in the right order.

I am reminded of old school parallel SCSI: three terminations are needed: one at each end of the bus, plus that of a black rooster at midnight with-in a circle of black candles.

Once you learn the habbit of navigating to neverssl.com as soon as you connect to a public WiFi network to force the captive portal/auth you'll usually not have any issues with it unless the WiFi network itself sucks.

I usually use notpurple.com for this (I used to use purple.com until the guy finally sold the domain to the mattress company), but I suppose there's no guarantee the notpurple person won't some day add ssl.

Thanks for the tip.

Wow, I’ll have to remember that. I always am fumbling to get to an http site to redirect when I go on the train or somewhere.

I use example.com or example.org, which seems to work just fine also.

Thank you nice site tip! One after one my goto http sites adds a s.

Haha. Great to see more websites using SSL encryption but it does make it harder to connect to public WiFi if the OS's captive portal detection doesn't trigger properly.

>Digital wireless just seems like a very very difficult field.

Indeed It is. And not much appreciation about it anywhere either.

>The only digital wireless communication tech that seems rock-solid is the 3GPP stack (GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G).

And that is why they are expensive. Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it. Everyone likes to shit post on 3G / 4G / 5G without actually spending any time to understand the insane difficulty of wireless. No one realise we got 10,000x capacity improvement in the last 20 years on mobile network. All while siding with Apple and suggest they should only pay 30cents on patent to Qualcomm or Ericsson.

> Again no one appreciate the work that was done on 3GPP, nor are they willing to pay much for it.

Ideally, you would have governments spend tax money on universities and national standardization bodies to do the R&D and publication of open standards, and then both companies and private efforts can openly use these standards to develop products against, with clearly defined interfaces and interoperability expectations.

It doesn't help that the Bluetooth stack on Windows is still pretty finicky after so many years. I bought some fairly decent Bluetooth headphones for the kids so they wouldn't have to worry about tangling up cords and they are basically worthless because the OS keeps getting in a state where they know that they are there but refuse to associate. I have to go in and manually forget the headphones and re-add them every other time the kids want to use them. If I pair them with my phone they work perfectly every time. The Linux stack is also prone to flaking out randomly in much the same way. The dreaded "resource temporarily unavailable" being an annoyingly common message on my laptop when it forgets about the speakers again.

Whether Bluetooth sucks or not I'm not sure. But man they didn't help themselves with the robotic voice "HUA-IP 20 Pro disconnect" followed shortly by "Connected to HUA-IP 20 Pro and GBK-w-006" every time something goes in or out of range.

Yes that sucked. 5 years ago it was already possible to rename the device at least for Windows and macOS: https://adrianba.net/2020/12/18/changing-bluetooth-pc-name/

Anyway even fixing that and having only one device connected I feel that the Bose Quietcomfort would disconnect too easily or were too slow to reconnect after reopening a MacBook. This is noy a critique of Bose Quietcomfort, in fact all other headphones and soundboxes with bluetooth I tried were MUCH WORSE.

Ah, yes, I remember that Bose feature, I had a Bose BT speaker a few years ago (actually it's still here somewhere, but I haven't used it in a while). But I don't think it's a synthesized voice - the German version has a distinctly disappointed sound when it has to inform you that something has disconnected. Good to know that the headphones have that too (as a "con" argument for getting QC headphones).

It can be disabled, so it just beeps instead.

Thanks for the hint. In Bose connect the option is "voice alerts". Now just down to a modestly annoying beep.

I have those headphones and they do indeed rock. The problem is: most cellphones don’t have headphone jacks. My cellphone broke last summer and everything with a headphone jack was backordered. So now when my headphones die on (say) a long flight, I just can’t listen to music anymore, because they don’t work while plugged in. Bluetooth sucks, and not just because it’s unreliable.

I got myself a charging port (iPhone) adapter for headphones - just for such a use case, long flights. But can still face a problem if needing to charge while listening to music / audio book.

I use a wireless charger for this but there are also very cheap adapters that allow you to attach power on one side and headphones on the other and then connect the thing to your lightning port.

Is there an answer though to the question of how to fix it? Obviously it's designed to operate in a pretty noisy slice of bandwidth, is that the root of their problem? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with their approach that they can't change without breaking backwards compatibility?

The spec is so complicated that it's impossible to implement correctly (or so I hear).

I do think it would help a lot to have 5GHz Bluetooth.

I was looking to buy new headphones and know from experience that I wanted bluetooth, and wired mode with a wired mic. I was surprised to not find a single headphone with all 3 of these features. Apple, Bose and Sony ANC headphones do not have a mic that works in wired mode.

I ended up getting HyperX Cloud Mix (gave up on ANC). It has a built-in mic and a nice detachable boom mic. Both mics work in wired and bluetooth mode. I'll hang on to these until bluetooth v11 or whatever actually upgrades the one feature everyone needs: good audio quality in both directions without quirks.

On a side note, Windows 11 has recently added AAC support (used by Apple) and now makes only one bluetooth device for headphones (used to make multiple confusing profiles). So it is getting better.

In my experience QC35 works well with pretty much anything except some Apple computers, such as on some Macbooks. Might be chipset dependent.

In my experience QC35 works well on Linux/Windows PCs and laptops, iPhone/iPad and on Android devices.

I have a QC35 connected to linux laptop/android phone/toyota car. The problem is the headphones will randomly decide which one is going to win. Sometimes i turn on the headphones, they say they connect to the phone and the laptop, then I join a meeting and no audio. Usually have to turn the phone bluetooth off to get it working again. In the end i bought separate dedicated headphones to use for the laptop.

Yeah, that dual bluetooth connection "feature" is pretty annoying. It just plays audio from the device that first happened to send any sound, while the other device becomes completely muted. What were they thinking at Bose...

Mine work fine on Apple laptops. I’ve tried with several and even a Mac mini.

Bluetooth has failed in some device combinations for me, though. Seems like luck is required.

I think that somehow each Bluetooth device has its own kinks.

With my QuietComfort 35 sometimes the A2DP profile is not negotiated and it falls back to HSP/HFP which sounds like a landline in the 90s. Then you have to disconnect/reconnect it and hope it works this time.

Another pair of cheap sports headphones I own just like to pair with everything that is in range if no other device is connected.

And lastly my Sony WF-1000XM3 just never automatically connects to my phone. I always have to manually go into the Bluetooth menu to connect them.

I think there should be some type of conformity certification, not for the implementation of the Bluetooth protocol itself but for how a device has to act in certain scenarios.

> With my QuietComfort 35 sometimes the A2DP profile is not negotiated and it falls back to HSP/HFP which sounds like a landline in the 90s. Then you have to disconnect/reconnect it and hope it works this time.

This happens to my AirPods2. Very annoying, like a $5 pair of headphones.

I have similar experience with bluetooth audio devices. Meanwhile, I have been using bluetooth mice for over a decade and never had any problems. So, is it poor implementation? Or maybe bluetooth audio in particular is bad?

I thought that until I paid attention to the supported codecs. When I had a pair of Sennheisers that had AptX HD support, they sounded great on my Android phone and MacBook, but awful when I moved to an iPhone.

I feel like they dropped the ball with respect to spec compliance. I have some speakers that allow anybody to pair with them, even if they don't have physical access to the device, and I occasionally have apartment neighbors connect to them and start playing music. That shouldn't be possible...but anybody can just say that their product is Bluetooth compatible and get away with it.

They should have a rigid spec and a publicly available test kit, and a certification process for spec compliance.

"They should have a rigid spec and a publicly available test kit, and a certification process for spec compliance."

They do. One can only put the Bluetooth logo if the product passes compliance tests. For the pairing, Bluetooth allows different modes. Predictably, the least secure one became the most popular.

I still have mine (v. 1). I called support once about it. It can get into a mode where it needs to be rebooted. Overall, they work fine. Be sure to download the app and install the latest firmware update.

Also, using the audio cable and charging cable at the same time results in annoying digital noise in the headphones. It may be a ground loop issue that can be broken by charging and listening with different relative ground sources (gnd of USB must be different than the audio gnd).

I loved the QC35 headphones, because their introduction led to the fire sale of the older QC25 series, which I scored new for just under $150.

The QC25 uses a user-replaceable AA battery. And they're still going strong.

Someday I may even buy one of the Bluetooth adapters for them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MTQGY69

Being able to pop in a new AA battery is absolutely awesome when traveling - I still reach for my QC25s instead of my QC35s for long-haul flights.

That's one data point. I've been using my QC45 with a MBP and Android device and it works flawlessly. My hearing aid is connected to my Android via BLE and has worked consistently for which I'm really really grateful. I think it's a magnificent piece of technology.

Exactly. My phone still once every few days struggles to connect to my headphones or my car, until I reset the phone and it all works fine again

I've actually worked on a bluetooth stack, and even I have no idea why it's so unreliable.

For all the flaws I find not having my head tethered revelatory. I just can't stand it. I always feel like I have to hold my neck a certain way and make it sore.

in the 20 years I'm surprised that some company that makes both sources and headsets (sony, apple) haven't made their own proprietary protocol in parallel

It highly depends on the products.

I never had issues with my BT speaker.

I switch it on, it connects, and the PC automatically switches all output to it.

I can't use it for audio but it was a godsend for me for the past 20 years for mice and keyboards.

I personally don't think so. I owned Apple Magic Touchpads and Keyboards Gen 1 and now the new ones and I have them plugged in. You still get that 1-5 seconds delay in connection. In UX even a delay of few milliseconds can degrade the experience.

I feel the main problem is pair UI with vendors cheaping out on a designated pait button.

AFAIU it was basically FTP strapped onto a wireless PHY. It was hacky from the start.

Bose probably just sucks at making Bluetooth.

All other bluetooth headphones and soundboxes I've ever tried were in fact much worse than Bose. Some of them I didn't even manage to connect to in like a 20 minutes attempt at parties before just giving up and finding a cable or just using the laptop's soundboxes.

Bose almost certainly buys a Bluetooth chip from another vendor instead of making it themselves.

With the new BLE audio standard, everything will get better™

What are you talking about? BLE is not an audio standard.

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

I assume they're referring to LE Audio. From Wikipedia:

> Announced in January 2020, LE Audio will allow the protocol to carry sound and add features such as one set of headphones connecting to multiple audio sources or multiple headphones connecting to one source

No, but a BLE extension for audio is being created.

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