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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if you found a way to connect a Sony Bluetooth headset to a Mac and have both audio playing and microphone active, basically have a conversation. If you know please share, I never got such functioning, always either I can play audio, or I can record audio, but never both at the same time.

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Yeah, I have Sony WH1000-XM2 and XM5 and both work perfectly for Zoom and other video calls with my MacBook Air (M1) as well as my MacBook Pro (Intel 2019), I'm using it daily for work. Zero configuration, just pair and go. Sorry I can't help you with setting it up but I really didn't have to do anything, it worked immediately all by itself.

Thank you, I have the XM3 so somehow now I know that it's possible.

Have the XM3 as well but I use Windows. This is an annoying issue with current Bluetooth headphones. Basically your choice is high quality audio but no microphone, or low quality audio with microphone. When you have the headphones connected it should offer 2 different sound outputs. One for stereo and one for hands free audio. If the stereo output is active then the microphone won't work at all.

Edit: Here's a post that explains the issue better than I can. https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/fqf71z/wh1000xm3_can_...

For those with bluetooth woes:

I've had better luck in all operating systems with a stand-alone USB bluetooth audio dongle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089PYFLBN

It's not perfect, but the combination of "you can select the codec" and "the bluetooth stack is 100% out of the hands of the OS" gave me dramatically better results on almost every headset I tried.

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