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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

I would love to buy AirPods one day, but I have just had too many experiences telling someone on Zoom they sound like they’re under water, and they say, “hold on a sec that’s my AirPods.”

If Apple could fix that issue, this would be a nice product!

Unfortunately I don’t know how Apple could ever signal to me that they had fixed that issue.

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It's a limitation of Bluetooth's available bandwidth, especially with bidirectional audio. Apple added support for an improved speech codec, AAC-ELD, to the 3rd gen AirPods last year:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-the-next-...

AAC-ELD support was also apparently added to existing AirPods Pro and Max at the same time:

https://medium.marco.zone/apple-implemented-the-biggest-impr...

I'm not sure when AAC-ELD is used on the host side though. It probably depends on the version of macOS and maybe even which app is being used.

FWIW, macOS can be setup to use the AirPods for output and the built-in mic for input and that will likely result in better quality both for the person using AirPods and the person on the other end.

Personally, I still use a wired headset for my conference calls. Wires are a PITA but they Just Work.

> It's a limitation of Bluetooth's available bandwidth, especially with bidirectional audio.

I've often read this is the problem, but I don't buy it.

BTLE is up to 1 megabit. A high-quality audio stream is typically up to 320 kbps compressed. Voice can be compressed as low as 64 kbps and still sound as if the person is standing right next to you.

That's still less than 400 kbps, well under the 1 mbps BTLE supports.

So tell me...how is there not enough bandwidth?

Not disagreeing with you necessarily, but you should know that BLE and Bluetooth are (more or less) unrelated. Confusingly.

It's explained in the section on SCO at the link in my original comment:

> Bluetooth supports data rates of up to 3 MB/s and fully uncompressed stereo audio only needs about 1.4 MB/s. But, the 3 MB/s data rate is for an Asynchronous Connection Less (ACL) transfers under ideal circumstances. In practice, even 990 kb/s (what Sony’s LDAC codec uses) is not trivial to transmit reliably. But the Hands Free Profile doesn’t even use ACL, but Synchronous Connection Oriented (SCO) transfers. These have a fixed data rate of 64 kbit/s (bidirectional).

More here:

https://habr.com/en/post/456182/

> Synchronous Connection Oriented (SCO) and its enhanced version Enhanced Synchronous Connection Oriented (eSCO) are the modes used for Bluetooth voice transmission. The mode allows you to transmit sound and voice strictly in order, with a symmetrical speed of sending and receiving, without waiting for confirmation of transmission and re-sending packets. This reduces the overall delay in the transmission of audio over the radio channel, but imposes serious restrictions on the amount of data transmitted per unit of time and adversely affects the quality of the audio. When this mode is used, both the voice from the microphone and the audio are transmitted to the headphones with the same quality.

You should also know that (as mh- points out), BTLE is an separate protocol that is not used for audio. Audio devices use Bluetooth classic. That's also explained at https://habr.com/en/post/456182/ in the "Bluetooth 5, Classic and Low Energy" section.

You make good points. There are certainly gaps in my knowledge of Bluetooth.

> But the Hands Free Profile doesn’t even use ACL, but Synchronous Connection Oriented (SCO) transfers. These have a fixed data rate of 64 kbit/s (bidirectional).

Why are we limited to HFP? Does the Bluetooth spec not allow forming two A2DP connections to establish bi-directional audio?

I apologize if your link answers these questions, but it's currently throwing a 504 Gateway Timeout.

Is AAC-ELD standard on Bluetooth? LE Audio is the next standard for audio.

> It's a limitation of Bluetooth's available bandwidth

Other bluetooth headsets work fine, that can’t be the excuse

I've done A/B tests with Airpods (gen2) and the built-in mic on my M1 iMac and people always say Airpods are better, but both are good.

I've noticed what you're saying with people on older (Apple) laptops. I wonder if there's a connection. Honestly, sometimes I could swear that people are using the built-in mic and not the Airpods, but they swear they are not.

I listened to a lot of mic testing a few months ago, frustrated by the AirPods Pro Gen 1 too. My conclusion was that all wireless earphone mics are pretty bad, and you’re not going to sound good unless you hold the phone up to your cheek or use a headset. But if you just want the best you can get in wireless earphones, I think the Jabra Elite 7 Pro and Sennhesier Momentum 3 are both a step up from the AirPods Pro Gen 1. They sound cheaper and let in more background noise, but they don’t have that underwater sound, parts of your voice disappearing, or sporadic background noise amplification, making them more intelligible and less stressful on a call.

honestly you have to use the right tool for the job. if you’re speaking on video for a significant portion of the day you should have a microphone

Even just use the microphone on the macbook, its significantly better than the airpods mic and it doesn't cause the audio quality on your airpods to drop like you get when the mic is active.

Lots of people actually just have broken AirPods and the gen 1 Pro's in particular seem to have a lot of extremely common faults that surface. Like the mics just being completely blown out and crackling as people speak, even see it happening to people on the news who are using them.

I have AirPods Pro but I still use Jabra wired headset with mic for work and important video calls. No issues like devices stealing the Bluetooth away from each other, and voice sounds much better which can be important for people’s perception.

Anecdotally, I've never had this issue. Is it something that happens often?

Yeah two way bluetooth bandwidth is too low to support high quality audio. People speaking on airpods sound horrible

Yep. Airpods simply do not support decent sounding duplex audio: https://youtu.be/N6Y_Q7RYmmY?t=351

No bluetooth device supports decent duplex audio, that I know of.

Correct. We rely on the courage of companies smarter than us to come up with the solutions to these problems, but sometimes they forget to fix the problems they're responsible for causing.

I'm frankly quite surprised that Apple hasn't come up with its own competing version of Bluetooth to fix this yet. I know they must hate it.

yes, wired earbuds are much better for calls

Just try them, there's a 14 day no-questions-asked return policy.

They start breaking down after months, not days.

Mine have been working fine for a year and a half, haven't noticed any degradation. Not saying that doesn't happen, just that it's not a given.

Yeah this happens to me a lot too when using my airpods pro on zoom calls. Good to know I'm not the only one experiencing this.

The max are basically useless. They sound okaish compared to headphones 4-6x their price, but they love to pair with anything around and the mic is non existent. It's the most enjoyable brutally frustrating experience ever.

regarding the "hold on a sec" issue, that's the Mac, not the AirPods

Every time I dial in with an iOS device it works flawlessly. If it's on the Mac, I have to log in to YouTube and play some random nonsense to make sure they're connected before I start the call, and even then (today), they sometimes fail.

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