4 ms·

My only issue is that quality is trashed. The L and R airpods get out of sync. There is no solution for that yet on wifi let alone bluetooth. They basically tra

My only issue is that quality is trashed. The L and R airpods get out of sync. There is no solution for that yet on wifi let alone bluetooth. They basically trash quality for little convenience so you end-up paying more for worse quality. It may be fine for phone calls (using one airpod only) but for music is just stupid. The future of audio is wireless but I doubt it's a pair of bluetooth earphones.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
... and that would be awful! You are absolutely right: If somehow their execution doesn't eradicate those issues completely, it will absolutely undermine what they are doing. I guess the difference is that I have faith that they'll be able to pull it off to where all but the most hardened music listener/movie watcher won't be able to tell the difference (at which point they are likely not using wireless earbuds anyway). But I take your point -- if the wireless speakers will produce the lag some of us have come to know, it will be devastating.
andromeduck 10y ago
Source on sync issue?
- themihai 10y ago
  I think the issue is well known in the industry. Traditional bluetooth/wifi headphones could get away with it because L and R speakers are wired even if there was no wire for the audio source. There is a standard[0] being worked on but AFAIK currently there is no wireless version. Bluetooth is really a joke for audio. The reason why it is used on so many speakers today it's because most(if not all) of them don't work in a multi-channel configurations(i.e. stereo pairs) so they just allocate a big buffer to make up for the poor connectivity. The issue in multi-channel configurations is that you need to re-sync all the speakers constantly(i.e. every 0.5s) so the big buffer approach is not good enough anymore. Most of the bluetooth systems also convert the audio source to a more lossy format to reduce the bandwidth requirements. Shortly said bluetooth is not the future of wireless audio. At least not as it is today. Today it's rubbish compared with wired versions. Apple just packed a flawed technology in a nice package. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging
  - andromeduck 10y ago
    Yeah considering they just developed a chip to specifically address Bluetooth performance concerns, I thin it's premature to assume it'll have these issues.
    - themihai 10y ago
      The bluetooth connection/protocol is a standard, though. I would be happy to be proved wrong but I don't think it's the case. They didn't mention the issue(i.e. `we fixed this well known issue`) in the keynote either and I doubt they would not take credit for a such achievement. The chip seems designed to handle the connectivity ops (i.e. switch between mac, iphone etc) and noise cancellation. Bluetooth is simply not the right tool for multi-channel quality audio.

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago

... and that would be awful! You are absolutely right: If somehow their execution doesn't eradicate those issues completely, it will absolutely undermine what they are doing. I guess the difference is that I have faith that they'll be able to pull it off to where all but the most hardened music listener/movie watcher won't be able to tell the difference (at which point they are likely not using wireless earbuds anyway). But I take your point -- if the wireless speakers will produce the lag some of us have come to know, it will be devastating.

andromeduck 10y ago

Source on sync issue?

themihai 10y ago
I think the issue is well known in the industry. Traditional bluetooth/wifi headphones could get away with it because L and R speakers are wired even if there was no wire for the audio source. There is a standard[0] being worked on but AFAIK currently there is no wireless version. Bluetooth is really a joke for audio. The reason why it is used on so many speakers today it's because most(if not all) of them don't work in a multi-channel configurations(i.e. stereo pairs) so they just allocate a big buffer to make up for the poor connectivity. The issue in multi-channel configurations is that you need to re-sync all the speakers constantly(i.e. every 0.5s) so the big buffer approach is not good enough anymore. Most of the bluetooth systems also convert the audio source to a more lossy format to reduce the bandwidth requirements. Shortly said bluetooth is not the future of wireless audio. At least not as it is today. Today it's rubbish compared with wired versions. Apple just packed a flawed technology in a nice package. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging
- andromeduck 10y ago
  Yeah considering they just developed a chip to specifically address Bluetooth performance concerns, I thin it's premature to assume it'll have these issues.
  - themihai 10y ago
    The bluetooth connection/protocol is a standard, though. I would be happy to be proved wrong but I don't think it's the case. They didn't mention the issue(i.e. `we fixed this well known issue`) in the keynote either and I doubt they would not take credit for a such achievement. The chip seems designed to handle the connectivity ops (i.e. switch between mac, iphone etc) and noise cancellation. Bluetooth is simply not the right tool for multi-channel quality audio.