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Talking to my colleagues who are using Airpods (also non-Pro), the quality sounds terrible. Almost like they're talking over a phone line. This is paired to a ~
by cjrp 6y ago
Talking to my colleagues who are using Airpods (also non-Pro), the quality sounds terrible. Almost like they're talking over a phone line. This is paired to a ~2016 MB Pro though, so perhaps the older BT chipset makes a difference.
- xnyan 6y agoIt's not the bluetooth chipset that's the determining factor, but rather apple's proprietary W1 chip. There are a lot of exceptions depending on the device and the BT stack used, but to process both audio input from the mic and output to the headphones, and to provide the low latency needed for a voice call, bluetooth headsets go into SBO "mode" which drops the audio quality down to a tinny 8bit mono. If airpods (or certain beats headphones the right hardware) connect to a device with the W1 chip, instead of switching to SBO mode, they send a raw AAC stream to be decoded by the W1 chip. It's still compressed but much higher quality than SBO. 2016s don't have a W1, and as far as I am aware no mac does but I don't know that for sure. BT5 addresses some of this, and there are other proprietary addons to Bluetooth that do similar things, most of them made by qualcomm (aptx, aptx ll, etc)
- imtringued 6y agoIt's pretty telling that Bluetooth still isn't ready despite Apple dropping the audio jack years ago. The bluetooth standard is just bad. The only way it has a chance of getting fixed is by proprietary addons because that's the only way the committee can't mess it up.
- mft_ 6y agoI thought the W1 was only at the headphones-end of things?