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Comment by chis | Hacker News Reader

The connection type has nothing to do with it though. Modern bluetooth is basically transparent with 256kbps AAC, like you'd have to be an omega-expert listening in a silent room to identify it vs lossless. Certainly the difference you're noticing is just the headphone quality.

Honestly for me the Airpods 4 with ANC are one of the greatest feats of audio engineering ever. For such a tiny form factor they reproduce really great sound, big soundstage, AND they have good ANC without needing a closed earbud seal. They also have internal mics that listen to the response of your ear to adjust the sound profile, which you can hear happen in real time after bumping the earbuds. Obviously you can get better sound if you make different tradeoffs and wear over-ears, but they are absolutely cutting edge for what they are.

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> Modern bluetooth is basically transparent with 256kbps AAC, like you'd have to be an omega-expert listening in a silent room to identify it vs lossless.

Sure, unless you want to do something rare and exotic like, say, have a microphone on your headset. Then you get the HFP/HSP profile, which makes two tin cans linked by a string seem high quality by comparison.

If you’re outside with a smartphone, why do you actually need that though? If you call someone, their audio will be bad anyways, and when do you need playback and microphone at the same time? Outside multiplayer gaming, I don’t really know any application where high quality audio playback and microphone is needed at the same time.

Need? A committee of the dumbest software on your pc/phone will get together to tell you what you need, and they have decided you need tin-can audio quality so that the microphone can be active so that AT&T spyware embedded in the Taco Bell app can listen for off-hand comments about refreshing your phone to opportunistically target you with the spam-cannon.

I can understand people just fine with the voice profiles provided by Bluetooth. Strictly speaking, I don't need anything better than that.

But it sure is nice to be able to make phone calls where people don't sound worse than they did with digitally-switched analog landline telephones in 1995. Bluetooth doesn't get there at all.

The losses of Bluetooth even compound generationally: The inescapable tin-can audio of Bluetooth at one end first gets transmogrified by at least one intermediate lossy codec for transmission across/betwixt the network(s), and then gets tin-canned harder when the far end of the connection is also using Bluetooth.

For perspective: 1995's phone calls were ultimately limited by the G.711 codec, which itself dates to 1972. I'm not setting the bar very high here at all.

Calls on AirPods don’t sound worse to me than on the phone speakers, I don’t think the AirPods noticeably decrease the quality compared to the stuff happening on the phone network.

"The phone network"? As in the usually 8 kHz to 16 kHz quality call typically encoding at ~a quarter the rate of dial-up?

Of course that sounds like a tin can either way, it's coming in encoded with the quality of a tin can! People here are talking about modern VoIP calls (Teams/Slack/Discord/Zoom/etc) which have a snowball's chance in hell of sounding decent in the first place. HSP/HFP will often crank that right back down to traditional phone network quality again. You also lose stereo, which isn't so bad if the only thing you're doing is having a 1:1 call but kind of sucks for a background group call.

I mean: I, for one, was definitely talking about telephone calls. :)

But now that you mention it: Yeah, the state of common VoIP (Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever) is also usually not very good. It's like there's some huge bandwidth crunch here in 2026 that is driven by the strenuous demands of VoIP, except: There isn't.

When I was doing some live streaming with others in a studio a couple of years ago, we worked with some of that. It never sounded very good. (It doesn't sound very good when the big-time acts at CBS or NPR or Fox News do it, either.)

But! When we occasionally had remote co-hosts who had enough technical competence to make it work properly on their end, we were able to use SonoBus[1]. That audio was positively pristine, like they were sitting unseen in the same room as everyone else.

[1]: https://www.sonobus.net/

The "phone network" nowadays offer high quality sound. Things improved drastically with VoLTE and other technologies which allows much more bandwidth for calls than the old networks could support.

EVS is typically not horrendous, I just wouldn't describe it as the usual VoLTE quality yet. That's still most commonly AMR-WB at 16 kHz, though it'd depend largely on who you're dialing from what where I suppose. One person who dials local cell users on a 5G network will probably tend to get EVS, one who doesn't probably won't.

I think it's fairly obvious why one would want two-way audio on a telephone :)

As I mentioned in my comment, I don’t notice the worse Bluetooth quality on calls because the audio itself is already bad, so making calls isn’t really a reason to not use Bluetooth.

Your comment frustrates me! With that said, how about Discord? I have high speed internet 90% of my waking life, high enough for Discord to be high fidelity. I actively avoid using discord to join calls on my phone- because Bluetooth absolutely destroys quality. I use the same pair of headphones to use discord on my PC, with a separate mic, no problemo.

Surely it would be very rare to want to listen to music at its highest quality while simultaneously recording your voice. It’s perhaps conceivable for some sort of niche mode of music or audio production, I suppose.

I often play games while on discord voice chat. The audio quality of my game suffers. Unless I use a separate mike. (Which is how I solve it)

I'm frequently listening to music or a video in the background. Join a zoom call early because I don't want to be late, instant AM radio. You can argue I shouldn't do this, I'll argue that it shouldn't matter and should just work. It's 2026, not 1926.

I am now curious how much you can optimize the quality of a tin cans and a string. You could encode the sound digitally over the string perhaps. I wonder what bitrate (also bandwidth) you can achieve.

Using acoustic data transmission because it is easy and I am lazy, I'd guess comparable to copper wire broadband based on the short distances involved in an average tin-can + string operation.

Well, you can do 3.5 Mbps ADSL over wet string[0], which is about 5 channels of uncompressed 16-bit PCM at 44.1 KHz.

[0]: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...

Wait is that why my airpods (playing via my Mac) sound like crap as soon as somebody calls me? Cause the microphone turns on?

Yes it is

Oh my god, TIL -- thank you, brother, I've apparently been doing this incorrectly for years.

Why hasn't this been fixed? It seems like something that would be a high priority issue. And maybe it has? I noticed iPhone + AirPods doesn't suffer from this.

Modern pocket supercomputers don't divulge anything useful about the kind of connection that is being used for Bluetooth audio so we don't know if it's using 256kbps AAC or something else instead, and it cuts out in some areas of [insert city], and when it comes back it sounds demonstrably worse.

It's an inscrutable mess.

Wires don't have these problems. Plug them in. Use them. Clean the contacts every now and then if/when they get crudded up.

> 256kbps AAC

That only works with A2DP one-way audio. The two-way HFP mode still uses the horrible classic BT compression unless the new BLE-based LE Audio is used(but IIUC Apple still don't support it). Besides there are still many devices that only supports BT's own 2000s-optimal SBC codec.

Connection type means the sound quality drops significantly when headphones are used for speaking, though. Maybe don't notice as much in normal calls / only speech, but using Bluetooth when gaming and some kinda of voice chat makes all game music / ambient sounds sound so crunchy.

For some reason my iphone sporadically won't go back to "music quality" mode after cutting a call on a wireless speaker or car play, and it's incredible how bad music sounds with telephone quality.

The trick is to switch input to the laptop/external mic. Audio quality stays great. It’s kind of ridiculous that Bluetooth still needs the shitty lo-fi mode when the mic is on - I was recently surprised that this is still the case with modern headphones like it was a decade ago.

Isn't the main issue that the audio you're compressing over bluetooth, like spotify streams, is already compressed? As far as I know, compressing already compressed audio compounds artifacts in the same way re-saving a JPEG does.

Nah put on some quality headphones and the sound stage will blow your head off.

Comparison is the thief of joy. I remember when I first got a 1080p display, comparing it to my previous 480p one the difference was amazing, but before I got the 1080p display I had no problem with my old one.

All that to say.. what's best, cheap, no wires, no headaches and happy or expensive, wires, having to download music and make a library etc and always looking for the next high, the next minor improvement?

One of the happiest days of my life was when I listened to my music on a 10$ mp3 player with 2$ earphones after 3 months of not listening to it.

So yeah, you may be right, even though I've tried 3000$ open-ear audiophile headphones, with an amazing amplifier, listening on tidal and it didn't blow me away but even if it did, I'd be stupid to even try, then I'd know what I'm missing and craving a 5000$ setup when I'm already happy with the 1 inch box I can easily carry wherever I go.

> what's best, cheap, no wires, no headaches and happy or expensive, wires

You can get great sounding wired iems for very little money, while wireless earbuds are usually pretty pricey for anything not crummy. Cables are indeed annoying, but so is your earbuds being dead because you forgot to charge them. The battery problem gets worse too as they age. If you want reliable, cheap, good sounding music it is pretty hard to beat chi-fi iems.

Beyerdynamic has ruined me. And it's not even the best out there.

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