4 ms·

My real problem with BT is how unreliable it is. I'd like to find someone who never had an issue pairing some earphones or headphones and had it working flawles

by Renaud 6y ago

My real problem with BT is how unreliable it is. I'd like to find someone who never had an issue pairing some earphones or headphones and had it working flawlessly every time. There are many variants of BT audio and they don't all work the way you would expect. It's still not rare to end up with lag if your combination of hardware, software and receivers don't have compatible technologies like aptX. For me the unreliable and lengthy pairing process is the major pain. Takes out the earbuds, wait at least 10-20s to get them connected, then wait another 10s for the phone to realize it needs to output to the earbuds. More often than I'd like, I have to put back the buds in their case and take them out again to force a reconnection because the phone or one of the buds said it was connected but isn't getting any sound... And I'm not talking about a cheap Chinese Android phone with a pair of crap $20 earbuds. I'm talking about iPhone 11 Pro with Sony 1000XM3. It's not the equipment, had similar issues with an iPhone 8 and Bose headsets, and with various dongles and computers. A friend recently thought his new Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones were not working and asked me to have a look. Took me 15 minutes to hook them to Windows properly. Turns out there are multiple devices that appear (but not at the same time) during the pairing process and if you connect to the BLE stack, you don't get the headphone functionality... (what functionality you get is a mystery) and of course, no mention of that in the documentation. Wireless audio is important enough that we shouldn't have to settle for these subpar experiences. Although BT has made progress on the audio front by providing protocols with lighter overhead and latency, it's still not particularly suited for audio (no high quality transmission, mono/stereo only, no multicast, lengthy connection, ...) It is what is is, but it's not what it should be.

aetherspawn 6y ago
It’s gotten a lot better recently. But you do have to remember to unpair the last device before trying to use a new device because you can only connect one thing at a time.
Kaze404 6y ago
In case that wasn't a rhetorical question, I use a Sennheiser 4.50BTNC every day and it works flawlessly, both on my phone and on my Linux computer (through a generic USB adapter).
- Macha 6y ago
  I've two complaints with the 4.50btnc. 1. Audio quality is not as good as my older same price headphones (3.30 I think), even with noise cancelling turned off. Apparently the 4.40 is better in this regard at the cost of losing the noise cancelling feature. 2. It can connect to two devices at once in a mostly intelligent manner, e.g. your phone and laptop where the laptop is playing music but the phone takes priority for calls or noisy alerts or alarms. But if one of these devices disconnects, its going to interrupt your audio every 2 minutes to say "Disconnected" until you reboot the headphones and connect just your new device(s). This has caused trouble with my Surface Go waking up from sleep, connecting automatically, then going back to sleep and disconnecting, disrupting my music listening.
Jugurtha 6y ago
>My real problem with BT is how unreliable it is. I'd like to find someone who never had an issue pairing some earphones or headphones and had it working flawlessly every time. The first project I worked on was for elderly care[0], with a fitness tracker we would connect with over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The first things I had done was to request the manufacturer's communication protocol for that device and then abstract that away in a nice library so we could control the tracker with Python functions `tracker.start_ecg()`, etc. The second part was dealing with all the weird connectivity problems, troubleshoot, and add helpful exception messages for others. Here's an example: message = """ We were unable to connect to the device {}{}{}... Bluetooth devices are tricky and even when you do everything right, you can still get this exception. Here are a few things to consider: - Simply retry to connect. - Check `rfkill list`: it will tell you whether your device is blocked or not. If it is indeed blocked, you can run: `\x1b[33mrfkill unblock bluetooth\x1b[0m` to unblock it. - Check `hciconfig`: it will tell you whether your device is down or up. If it is down, you can raise your device: `\x1b[33msudo hciconfig [hci0|hci1] up\x1b[0m`. - You can also restart the bluetooth service: `\x1b[33msudo service bluetooth restart\x1b[0m`. - Calling Bluetooth.connect with the wrong hci_device param can result in this exception, too. Check which device is active and call the method with that one. - Take a deep breath, you'll probably get this often. """ [0]: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/1303496923308085256 https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/130349692330808525...
- maxerickson 6y ago
  What's the target market for a product that exposes the whole Linux device stack to an end user?
  - Jugurtha 6y ago
    I don't understand your comment. Are you referring to the error message? If yes, that is targeted to the developers using the library that controls the device. i.e: us. The library helps us talk to a device by abstracting away low level details.

by Renaud 6y ago

aetherspawn 6y ago

It’s gotten a lot better recently. But you do have to remember to unpair the last device before trying to use a new device because you can only connect one thing at a time.

Kaze404 6y ago

In case that wasn't a rhetorical question, I use a Sennheiser 4.50BTNC every day and it works flawlessly, both on my phone and on my Linux computer (through a generic USB adapter).

Macha 6y ago
I've two complaints with the 4.50btnc. 1. Audio quality is not as good as my older same price headphones (3.30 I think), even with noise cancelling turned off. Apparently the 4.40 is better in this regard at the cost of losing the noise cancelling feature. 2. It can connect to two devices at once in a mostly intelligent manner, e.g. your phone and laptop where the laptop is playing music but the phone takes priority for calls or noisy alerts or alarms. But if one of these devices disconnects, its going to interrupt your audio every 2 minutes to say "Disconnected" until you reboot the headphones and connect just your new device(s). This has caused trouble with my Surface Go waking up from sleep, connecting automatically, then going back to sleep and disconnecting, disrupting my music listening.

Jugurtha 6y ago

>My real problem with BT is how unreliable it is. I'd like to find someone who never had an issue pairing some earphones or headphones and had it working flawlessly every time. The first project I worked on was for elderly care[0], with a fitness tracker we would connect with over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The first things I had done was to request the manufacturer's communication protocol for that device and then abstract that away in a nice library so we could control the tracker with Python functions `tracker.start_ecg()`, etc. The second part was dealing with all the weird connectivity problems, troubleshoot, and add helpful exception messages for others. Here's an example: message = """ We were unable to connect to the device {}{}{}... Bluetooth devices are tricky and even when you do everything right, you can still get this exception. Here are a few things to consider: - Simply retry to connect. - Check `rfkill list`: it will tell you whether your device is blocked or not. If it is indeed blocked, you can run: `\x1b[33mrfkill unblock bluetooth\x1b[0m` to unblock it. - Check `hciconfig`: it will tell you whether your device is down or up. If it is down, you can raise your device: `\x1b[33msudo hciconfig [hci0|hci1] up\x1b[0m`. - You can also restart the bluetooth service: `\x1b[33msudo service bluetooth restart\x1b[0m`. - Calling Bluetooth.connect with the wrong hci_device param can result in this exception, too. Check which device is active and call the method with that one. - Take a deep breath, you'll probably get this often. """ [0]: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/1303496923308085256 https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/130349692330808525...

maxerickson 6y ago
What's the target market for a product that exposes the whole Linux device stack to an end user?
- Jugurtha 6y ago
  I don't understand your comment. Are you referring to the error message? If yes, that is targeted to the developers using the library that controls the device. i.e: us. The library helps us talk to a device by abstracting away low level details.