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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Yes, bloody HFP.

I can't believe we're in 2023, WiFi can do 40Gbps, but Bluetooth still has no reasonable high quality, bidirectional audio mode.

Skype, Zoom and the like have been around for ages. The usefulness of high quality voice communication is very, very old at this point.

So what's the holdup?

Also, I don't quite understand why nobody worked around this yet? I never looked into Bluetooth properly, but it's a protocol that like USB can present a set of capabilities and negotiate features, right?

What's stopping anyone from say, supporting a higher bandwidth mode of HFP, or offering sensible modern codecs like Opus, while remaining compatible with the normal standard?

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> So what's the holdup?

Judging by the incredibly fractured state of bluetooth codecs in general I'm gonna blame patents and the completely fucked up and maligned governance of the bluetooth standards body.

You only have to take one glance at the professional performance space to understand that the problems were solved before bluetooth even existed, and today there are completely free and open codecs in use in wireless mic and in-ear-monitors that beat the speed-of-sound latency of a speaker 15 feet away. That's the point of professional monitors, after all.

The entire bluetooth ecosystem is the most gigantic tech clusterfuck there is. It's amazing it even works.

> It's amazing it even works.

I find that my life contains less frustration when I act as though it doesn't work.

Probably for the same reason that most Bluetooth keyboards (with which we type high-sensitivity passwords!) still use a quite insecure encryption algorithm, i.e. some combination of incredibly bloated specs (Bluetooth alone is thousands of pages) and slow industry adoption of said complex specs.

Add to that the additional patent risk inherent to audio codecs, and you get the status quo.

> Also, I don't quite understand why nobody worked around this yet?

Apple implemented proprietary codec for AirPods to have high quality audio with mic when connected to macOS/iOS device. With other host AirPods fallback to A2DP/HFP, and macOS with non-Apple headphones has the same problem, as described in this blog.

I think Bluetooth protocol spec is not free and because of that ecosystem is very fractured.

I hope the situation will improve with Bluetooth 5.3s LE Audio/LC3[1][2]. Regardless, it's not backwards compatible with existing Bluetooth devices...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/bluetooth/comments/1746e02/does_blu...

[2]: https://www.soundguys.com/bluetooth-le-audio-lc3-explained-2...

100%

From what I've read in the last few days researching to write the post, it feels like Bluetooth was designed under some constraints 20 years ago, and it keeps using the same constraints today.

Also, the companies listed in the HFP specification don't make me think they're trying to optimize for the actual phone call scenario, not using a bluetooth headphone with your laptop.

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