But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for there to even be two different modes.
Why is this still happening?
Implementing special requirements is always inconvenient for users because no B2C wants to risk bad the-microphone-didn’t-work reviews, customer returns, and support tickets.
Nevermind coordinating with arbitrary USB microphone latency…I’ve got one with 250ms of it.
I don't think you have any idea what you're saying. The scenario I'm describing is when you want to use a bluetooth headset that includes a microphone. Using a different microphone is how you solve the problem.
If I had an issue, wired headphones seem a simpler solution than changing the bluetooth standard and more likely to work than wishing manufacturers changed their devices.
If it didn't, I'd use wires.
Or something else.
the bluetooth audio streaming profile enables more codecs, but only playback, and allows significantly higher latency that you wouldnt accept on a call
That latency is also a millstone. We can do much better, but the standard lags and implementations lag even more.
Just delaying the sound and playing all of it would be a big improvement.
(Though that would fail badly for watching videos. That's something that uses 'headphones' mode anyway - why is latency OK there? It isn't.
My ear clips do add some latency, a noticeable amount, when I'm watching a video with mpv, and I adjust that by altering the A/V sync setting. They don't do the same thing when I'm watching something on youtube. I'd like to know what's going on there.)
> why is latency OK there? It isn't.
well.. if you listen to music, you probably dont care too much, but if you're talking to someone, you do.
whats much worse is also that latency is not constant.
If you use Linux + KDE, you can still use any microphone or headphone, many at the same time, or in whatever mode you want.
It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working.
Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings.
Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my thinkpad. So now I can actually enjoy the luxury of built-in microphones that work. Until the day it wont I guess.
but the audio quality in the sound + mic profile is very poor, the codec is only meant for speech
This doesn't really seem to respond to the problem. The problem is that I'd like to use a single bluetooth device that includes earpieces and a microphone. That doesn't work, because of the headphone-headset mode dichotomy. As I replied to another comment, using multiple devices would be a solution to the problem. It wouldn't be an example of the problem that I want solved.
Bluetooth is apparently incapable of simply delivering an audio stream to the earpieces while accepting one from the microphone. This is a baffling design. The assumption appears to be that there will never be more than one source of audio for output. But that's crazy.