This sounds like bad luck to me, but who knows. I use a pair of over-ear noise canceling bt headphones, and they sound just fine. I wouldn't call them amazing,

This sounds like bad luck to me, but who knows. I use a pair of over-ear noise canceling bt headphones, and they sound just fine. I wouldn't call them amazing, but I'm not sure I can tell the difference between them and any other sub $100 headphones. One catch that I noticed: there are two profiles I can connect to my desktop with. One is simple audio streaming (a2dp maybe?) and sounds fine. The other (hsp?) supports microphone input and the sound degrades quite noticeably. Maybe you're connecting via this second mechanism?