4 ms·

I use a Plantronics Legend bluetooth headset, which is pretty good at cutting out background noise. Tested with a phone. Cheaper bluetooth headsets seem to pic

I use a Plantronics Legend bluetooth headset, which is pretty good at cutting out background noise. Tested with a phone. Cheaper bluetooth headsets seem to pick up everything around them. Had that issue with a coworker where the headset was worse than using the internal mic. Biggest and annoying issue though is consistent bluetooth disconnect/reconnect issues even on different MacOS machines. Latest firmware and such. Pretty sure it's not 2.4ghz interference.

gxqoz 6y ago
I've heard that the original Bluetooth standard is pretty terrible for audio, especially for microphones. On Windows PCs at least, old protocols can cause a bad experience: "Modern high-end Bluetooth headsets support AptX, an audio codec compression scheme that offers better sound quality. But AptX is only enabled if it’s supported on both the transmitter and receiver. When using a Bluetooth headset with a PC, it only works if your PC’s hardware and drivers are compatible." (https://www.howtogeek.com/354321/why-bluetooth-headsets-are-terrible-on-windows-pcs/ https://www.howtogeek.com/354321/why-bluetooth-headsets-are-...) Not sure if this applies to a Mac though.
cosmie 6y ago
It doesn't directly fix the disconnect/reconnect issue you're talking about, but I've found ToothFairy[1] super useful to mitigate the bulk of my MacOS bluetooth frustrations. A few different ways it's come in handy for me: - The Bluetooth speaker I use for music has a tendency to sporadically sound super hollow. Turns out it has a mic built in, and the voodoo of Mac's bluetooth stack would decide at random when it connected whether it would go into audio-only mode (and use the higher-bandwidth AAC codec) or go into audio+mic mode (splits the available bandwidth between the two and as a result uses a lower bitrate audio codec to compensate for the bandwidth drop). Used ToothFairy to always force that device into audio-only mode. - After the above discovery, tested doing the same with my actual headset, and leveraging the built-in mic for input. For call audio, it's pretty erratic on whether it'll have any impact at all, and depends heavily on the circumstances of the call itself. Sometimes the audio is massively better, but most of the time the audio is already degraded when it gets to my machine and the bluetooth improvement is moot. That said, makes music in between calls far more pleasant. - My bluetooth mouse is particularly susceptible to that consistent disconnect/reconnect issue you mentioned. ToothFairy can create a menubar icon for individual devices, which helps to act as a quick sanity check to see if my mouse has disconnected. ToothFairy can also run a shell script on disconnect, which has been handy. At this point I have it trigger a system notification[2] so I'm at least immediately made aware of it, check my idle time[3] in case it was the mouse going into sleep mode from inactivity, then conditionally leverage blueutil[4] to look for the device and reconnect if found (forcefully restarting the bluetooth stack in the process if it has issues). Doesn't fix whatever the root cause is for that consistent disconnect/reconnect issue, but this duct tape re-establishes a connection far more quickly when it happens, making the issue itself significantly less disruptive. I only stumbled on it via Setapp[1] and tried it on a whim, but it's definitely one of the more handy utility apps I've found and well worth the $5 App Store price for anyone that has similar bluetooth frustrations with their Mac. [1] https://c-command.com/toothfairy/ https://c-command.com/toothfairy/ [2] https://code-maven.com/display-notification-from-the-mac-command-line https://code-maven.com/display-notification-from-the-mac-com... [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/17966890 https://stackoverflow.com/a/17966890 [4] https://github.com/toy/blueutil https://github.com/toy/blueutil [5] https://setapp.com/apps/toothfairy https://setapp.com/apps/toothfairy

gxqoz 6y ago

I've heard that the original Bluetooth standard is pretty terrible for audio, especially for microphones. On Windows PCs at least, old protocols can cause a bad experience: "Modern high-end Bluetooth headsets support AptX, an audio codec compression scheme that offers better sound quality. But AptX is only enabled if it’s supported on both the transmitter and receiver. When using a Bluetooth headset with a PC, it only works if your PC’s hardware and drivers are compatible." (https://www.howtogeek.com/354321/why-bluetooth-headsets-are-terrible-on-windows-pcs/ https://www.howtogeek.com/354321/why-bluetooth-headsets-are-...) Not sure if this applies to a Mac though.

cosmie 6y ago

It doesn't directly fix the disconnect/reconnect issue you're talking about, but I've found ToothFairy[1] super useful to mitigate the bulk of my MacOS bluetooth frustrations. A few different ways it's come in handy for me: - The Bluetooth speaker I use for music has a tendency to sporadically sound super hollow. Turns out it has a mic built in, and the voodoo of Mac's bluetooth stack would decide at random when it connected whether it would go into audio-only mode (and use the higher-bandwidth AAC codec) or go into audio+mic mode (splits the available bandwidth between the two and as a result uses a lower bitrate audio codec to compensate for the bandwidth drop). Used ToothFairy to always force that device into audio-only mode. - After the above discovery, tested doing the same with my actual headset, and leveraging the built-in mic for input. For call audio, it's pretty erratic on whether it'll have any impact at all, and depends heavily on the circumstances of the call itself. Sometimes the audio is massively better, but most of the time the audio is already degraded when it gets to my machine and the bluetooth improvement is moot. That said, makes music in between calls far more pleasant. - My bluetooth mouse is particularly susceptible to that consistent disconnect/reconnect issue you mentioned. ToothFairy can create a menubar icon for individual devices, which helps to act as a quick sanity check to see if my mouse has disconnected. ToothFairy can also run a shell script on disconnect, which has been handy. At this point I have it trigger a system notification[2] so I'm at least immediately made aware of it, check my idle time[3] in case it was the mouse going into sleep mode from inactivity, then conditionally leverage blueutil[4] to look for the device and reconnect if found (forcefully restarting the bluetooth stack in the process if it has issues). Doesn't fix whatever the root cause is for that consistent disconnect/reconnect issue, but this duct tape re-establishes a connection far more quickly when it happens, making the issue itself significantly less disruptive. I only stumbled on it via Setapp[1] and tried it on a whim, but it's definitely one of the more handy utility apps I've found and well worth the $5 App Store price for anyone that has similar bluetooth frustrations with their Mac. [1] https://c-command.com/toothfairy/ https://c-command.com/toothfairy/ [2] https://code-maven.com/display-notification-from-the-mac-command-line https://code-maven.com/display-notification-from-the-mac-com... [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/17966890 https://stackoverflow.com/a/17966890 [4] https://github.com/toy/blueutil https://github.com/toy/blueutil [5] https://setapp.com/apps/toothfairy https://setapp.com/apps/toothfairy