Apple removed the Bluetooth Explorer, can't use high quality headset anymore | Hacker News Reader

Apple removed the Bluetooth Explorer, can't use high quality headset anymore

discussions.apple.com

48 pointsDLion11 comments

Oh my. I always wondered why audio degraded when the mic was in use. Here’s some terminal commands that might still work: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/05/13/how-to-improve-blue...

Can any Bluetooth sages on HN explain why macOS regresses audio quality in these situations, though? And if this is manually possible to fix, why would it not be the default - compatibility?

Update: I can confirm that none of this works on my M1 running Monterey 12.1

Apple's new Control Center Bluetooth menu bar also contains no way to even see what codec is being used now, they've removed a wealth of debugging information. Bluetooth Explorer is downloadable still for older versions of Xcode, but most of the features no longer work and it likewise contains no way to see the codec in use.

Baffling.

Exactly, before Monterey you could at least use the Bluetooth Explorer to turn this switch off but now everything seem not working anymore. I tried Bluetooth Explorer old version and they don't have any effect on the system. It's crazy I can't have high quality audio meanwhile on call for no reasons.

The funny thing is Apple doesn’t have to care because their moat is so enormous. They can pull shit like this with effectively no consequences.

I thought it was just an issue with the Bluetooth standard and having degraded audio always happened when the mic was on. It's an extremely frustrating experience when trying to use the in flight movie apps because they will detect there's a microphone and open it up.

I assume this is just so I can hear inflight announcements, even though my headphones support pass through audio modes if I really was worried and I didn't specifically buy expensive noise cancelling headphones where one of the main use cases is successfully blocking out jet engine noise.

Thank you! FWIW I've also sometimes found that switching your wifi to a 5ghz network prevents SBC quality drops. No idea why.

Maybe because bluetooth is stuck with 2.4ghz band. So when you move the noisy wifi out of this band, bluetooth gets extra bandwidth to transfer higher quality audio.

I'm becoming a luddite with each passing year. Smart phones even in 2005 had external antenna connectors under a rubber grommet. I never had to use one but it was cool that the engineers thought, "What would a BAMF need?". I miss that. Now it's all engineered to the lowest common denominator and then neglected.

Soon, they will be selling us pocket calculators at apple prices.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/enable-aptx-aac-bluetooth-a...

Despite him stating otherwise in the thread the same happens on windows 10/11 with the exact same headphones.

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