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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

It was a Bluetooth issue years ago. Now it's only an Apple issue where it can't use a more decent codec. On Linux you can choose the mSBC codec and get decent two-way quality on a modern headset.

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>Bluetooth issue

Its a licensing issue. The borderlands between the headset and headphone profiles are rife with licensing land-mines - developers have flipped the table and rage-quit the issue, and this technical debt has been shipped.

(Disclaimer: I make headset/headphone firmware for a major competitor and deal with this issue every single week...)

I just encountered the term "The Ultimate Sadness" reading https://www.computerenhance.com/p/the-case-of-the-missing-in... immediately before this post and I feel like you've found an even worse sadness to deal with on a regular basis.

My sympathies, and I appreciate your willingness to wade through neck deep licensing excrement to produce something that still works.

This honestly sounds like a problem I would expect to be solved by white-labelled AliExpress junk products, whose manufacturers can just ignore the licensing issues entirely, because they’re able to hide their IP violations behind reselling through endless shell companies.

But I guess it isn’t solved by that. Why isn’t it?

You can't hide from the fact that you have to get your chips from somewhere, and those chips have to run some software, and if you are going to just copy others' software, you inherit their technical debt too - unless you invest in fixing their bugs - and what white-label AliExpress junk product provider has the time for that?

Regardless of codecs, don't all Bluetooth headsets switch to mono I/O when the microphone connects? I find that to be a much bigger quality hit than the encoding.

Not on Windows to my knowledge.

Using the same headset on both Windows and Linux leads to a very different experience. Windows works fine. Linux has the issue macOS has mentioned here.

> It was a Bluetooth issue years ago

It still is, mSBC is really not that good, plus all things considered reasons go beyond just the codec, see my nearby comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41705258

Switching to "2x half-duplex" on both ends is really the best thing. I hate it that you can't separately select audio input and output in iOS.

mSBC has garbage audio quality.

The macOS utility Audio MIDI Setup allows you to pick separate devices for this and it also lets you separate the device for system sounds from the device for other sounds.

mSBC is still crappy quality compared to what I get on my smartphone. But still Linux allows me to easily use AAC or APTX codec and a separate mic if I want.

I don't understand why all desktop OS can't have something better while when I pair my Bose headset on my smartphone it seems to be using a better quality codec profile.

idk man airpods do switch to an AAC variant called AAC-ELD for bidirectional audio but thats still compressed to hell. better than SBC but not as good as unidirectional AAC.

I had high hopes for BLE Audio but that seems to be stalled

No, I've had this happen multiple times using various bluetooth headphones with my Google Pixel 8. So it's definitely happening on Android as well.

It happens on Windows too. In fact it's probably worst there, because the Windows Bluetooth stack is so awful.

> Now it's only an Apple issue where it can't use a more decent codec.

Isn't this a Mac-specific issue? I have some recollection in my head that Mac OS uses a terrible codec for bidirectional bluetooth audio, but iOS uses a good one.

It’s sometimes still an issue on windows but besides advertising the headset audio device most good headsets will create one or more additional audio devices that support high quality input and output.

Yet another Apple gotcha. I stoped paying the Apple tax long ago. The “ it just works” mantra is long gone

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