9 ms·
Bluetooth 6.2 – more responsive, improves security, USB comms, and testing
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoWhat’s the status of audio on modern Bluetooth? The only decent mic+audio configuration I’ve ever experienced is AirPods on apple devices, anything else sounds terrible when the microphone is activated.
- mrcsharp 1y agoI found it to be a headache trying to get LE Audio to work on my Windows machine. It should provide good audio quality when the microphone is in use but: - I have to have BLE v5.2 at least on my Windows device - It must have isosynchronous audio support (which I believe is an optional feature in the spec) - The headset must have the same features too. Then it is a question of which audio codecs are supported on those 2 devices. It's quite messy to be honest.
- summm 1y agoOn Linux it is even worse: there is apparently no USB dongle that would support isochronous audio and recent enough BLE versions. Only some very limited selection of newer PCIe Wi-Fi cards.
- dogma1138 1y agohttps://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-UK/p/btd-700 https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-UK/p/btd-700 Works on SteamOS out of the box and with all the features as far as I can tell.
- summm 1y agoThat dongle has its own Bluetooth stack and is exposing a standard audio device via USB. Indeed that currently seems to be the only way, but then the stack need config input somehow, which in case of this one requires a proprietary Win/Mac Software.
- gkhartman 1y agoI've had a similar experience. I avoid most Bluetooth devices as a result. I can vouch for the CMF Buds Pro 2. They're the first bt buds I've had with good noise cancelling on mic that weren't made by Apple.
- Spunkie 1y agoEvery apple user I've seen on meetings using airpods for their mic sounded terrible as well. I don't think any ear pod style mic exists that isn't completely outclassed by a mic I could pickup 2 decades ago at Walmart for $10-$20.
- culopatin 1y agoBut for many the audio you hear also gets degraded. Like when Windows sets it as communication device instead of headphones and it sounds like a 64kbps mp3s
- clort 1y agoMy information may be a little out of date, but in Bluetooth there was two types of audio. There is isochronous streaming (Headset profile) and audio streaming (Audio Profile). The Headset profile is bidirectional and time-sensitive (packets will be dropped if they take too long), it was designed for headsets as per its name ("communication device") rather than the Audio profile which, although it can be a source or a sink is basically for streaming, where the audio is not time-sensitive as such. So yeah, the isochronous streaming mode is much lower bit rate but thats probably why Windows sets it as a communications device, because it needs that mode. Its difficult to know exactly, but I use a Logitech Zone Vibe 125 headphones with microphone and find it works fine for phone calls and listening to audio. However, I am not an audio nerd and neither are the people I speak to using it. I never had any luck with in-ear devices.
- viraptor 1y agoThe best you can do these days while keeping to the standard is to use mSBC codec which at least does bidirectional 16bit. It's not too common unfortunately. At least on Linux you can force the codec you want with pipewire. On Mac you just get whatever Apple decides you're allowed.
- jeroenhd 1y agomSBC is kind of a hack, though. It pushes Bluetooth beyond its specifications and often works, but in my experience it also often causes dropped audio in less than ideal situations (i.e. walking with a Bluetooth headset on). mSBC is worth a try if you haven't already tried it, but it's not a real solution. Bluetooth LE Audio does provide a fix, but real hardware that supports it is hard to come by.
- ehnto 1y agoI am unsure if it's possible, it's just a really bad location for a mic. It is somewhat inevitable to pickup background noise so I suspect you would need a lot of signal processing to filter and reconstruct a decent signal. The form factor doesn't help either, the mics are tiny. Phones have the benefit of a bit more space and a much more practical location.
- cstrahan 1y agoI think OP is talking about the compression and bit rate, not the placement of the mic. When the mic is turned on, many headsets go from sounding good enough to sounding absolutely horrible. Something about switching from A2DP to HFP, and sharing the bandwidth between the incoming audio and outgoing audio. AirPods are impacted much, much less, largely I think because the AAC-ELD codec is decent, and Apple OSes switch the audio from stereo to mono when the mic is on (which seems like a no-brainer IMO, but I guess not all operating systems do this).
- gbil 1y agotry to connect more than 2 devices simultaneously on your mac and "enjoy" the sound you get then. I had this problem with either intel or m* mac and it seems from a search on the Internet that it is widespread to the point that is the normal. Nowadays I only use dongles for mouse+keyboard+headset to avoid such issues, at least the usb-c ones are quite bearable on size you just need to be careful how you put your laptop in the bag, which way up.
- jeroenhd 1y agoThat's just a Bluetooth capacity problem. Bluetooth isn't built for high throughput scenarios and "HD bidirectional audio" is considered high throughput in this case. Same problem happens with a combination of earbuds and a smart watch, or headphones and a Bluetooth mouse, depending on the interference and chattiness of your devices.
- fransje26 1y ago> Same problem happens with a combination of earbuds and a smart watch, or headphones and a Bluetooth mouse Oh! TIL. I will have to keep using that port-hogging mouse dongle then..
- jeroenhd 1y agoIt depends on how chatty your mouse is. "Gaming" or "high-resolution" mice can spam the BT piconet and cause issues, but a basic office mouse will work without issues.
- vel0city 1y agoIt definitely varies a good bit with the hardware in question, and even how saturated 2.4GHz is in your current environment. I currently have a bluetooth mouse, a bluetooth keyboard, and bluetooth headphones all on the same device and haven't had any issues. On a different computer with a different bluetooth chipset it would have issues with audio when I moved my mouse around a lot.
- gbil 1y ago
- whatevaa 1y agoBluetooth doesn't have the bandwith to support anything better. Airpods are as far as you can push it with complete vertical stack control. The magic is in codecs and dynamic switching of them based on whether you are speaking or not.
- chekibreki 1y agoIs it really that hard to increase the bandwidth in 2025 to get mic quality that doesn’t sound awful? Opus can be really efficient at low bitrates AFAIK.
- Gigachad 1y agoHow does wifi support multiple gigabit now while Bluetooth can’t support a microphone that isn’t horrendous?
- systemz 1y agoIn short - BL uses much less energy than WiFi. It's harder to have speed and be battery friendly at same time.
- Philip-J-Fry 1y agoBut we have Bluetooth doing lossless audio. If we can do lossless or 700kbps+ audio then we can spare a bit of that bandwidth for the microphone.
- u8080 1y agoNo, bluetooth has enough bandwidth for 990kbps LDAC, so it should be possible to do 128kbps stereo + 64kbps OPUS mono mic.
- ACCount37 1y agoLE Audio fixes it, but almost nothing supports LE Audio as of yet.
- beAbU 1y agoAirpods have dogshit mic quality from the listener's perspective, just FYI. Everyone in the call might sound nice to your ears, but you sound horrible to everyone else. You need to use your device's mic on video calls to have a remote chance of sounding semi decent.
- m463 1y agoI wish we could have really really good microphones. The built-in iphone microphones are wonderful compared to wired and bluetooth microphones. I think there are 3 or 4 and they do a spectacular job. Why can't we have multiple microphones and do a better job.
- SuperMouse 1y agoAny interesting changes regarding BLE Meshing? We evaluated it BT5.x and the performance was not overly satisfying.
- edweis 1y agoIt is the first time I see a specification 3881 pages long!
- godelski 1y agoIt's been that way for awhile? 4.0 and 5.0 were ~2.8k pages. Even 2.1 is 1420 pages https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/?types=adopted&keyword=Core+Specification&filter= https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/?types=adopte...
- userbinator 1y agoAll the wireless standards are like that. IEEE 802.11 from 2012 is nearly 2800 pages, and I'm sure the latest version has far exceeded that. ...and the GSM/UMTS/LTE/NR standards are at least an order of magnitude even bigger.
- miki123211 1y agoIf I remember correctly, the entirety of the original GSM is ~9000 pages, things just got crazier (by orders of magnitude) from there. That's comparing apples to oranges, though. Those standards also specify the interaction between network components, not just between your phone and the network. Mobile phone standards are more like the entire RFC collection than like the 802.11 specifications.
- childintime 1y agoWritten by AI? Sizes like that nicely lock out newcomers from the market, as it can't be entered without a strong financial backing.
- surajrmal 1y agoYou don't need to implement the full spec. Most devices only support the parts relevant to them. Hardware in general is very expensive though so I doubt a very long spec that helps you achieve comparability with existing devices is the thing holding you back.
- 1y ago
- eimrine 1y agoWhat is the latest Bluetooth version having FOSS realizations?
- dust42 1y agoBluez seems now to have support for 5.4. But in general there is very little support for 5.4 from the hardware side right now. I looked into ESLs (electronic shelf labels) which should be directly supported by 5.4 but you find almost nothing. Would just be nice if one could take any manufacturer's ESLs and they would just work. Right now there is a plethora of different standards. I wont hold my breath for 6.2 support. There are not many devs on bluez and on the kernel side.
- rickdeckard 1y agoOn Hardware side the support for 5.x is not bad, Nordic Semiconductor for example is quite fast in adding support to their stack, and the updated stack is available for most (if not all) of their chipsets. That said, even if a company which already launched its product would upgrade their stack to a newer version, it's unlikely that they would spend the money and resources to re-certify for a newer BT-version unless there's an explicit need for it. They rather treat this as a maintenance release of the existing certification... So it might be that there are more devices with 5.4 BT-stack out there than it seems...
- maxlin 1y agoIf this doesn't fix the damn "audio quality goes to 10kbps if you also want a mic" I'm going to electrocute the devs responsible with the voltage common BT devices running this stack require.
- drdaeman 1y agoLE Audio now has GMAP (Gaming Audio Profile) which supposedly solves the problem with HFP/HSP crap. However, almost no hardware out there seem to support it - the only one I’ve read about are some Creative earbuds (Aurvana 2, I think) with a BT-W6 dongle, and I don’t like earbuds (and dongles) so I haven’t tried those. Haven’t found any over-the-ear headset - if anyone knows of something, I would greatly appreciate any recommendations.
- u8080 1y agoWH-1000XM6 should support GMAP according to reddit, however Mediatek PCIE Wi-Fi/BT combos seems have crap drivers and I was not able to make it working. And Intel ones does not work with AMD CPUs(sounds like bullshit, but it requires some Intel proprietary DSP driver to supposedly "decode LC3").
- mort96 1y agoWhy would they fix that in the standard when Qualcomm has a proprietary solution which generates royalties revenue for them? Qualcomm would probably vote against that when it comes up in Bluetooth SIG discussions Same goes for A2DP with a remotely decent compression algorithm which doesn't sound like crap I'm cynical enough to believe that these obvious huge missing parts of standard Bluetooth aren't accidental. They've surely noticed.
- rickdeckard 1y agoYeah, it's a dilemma. Modern times are no longer suitable for industry-wide standards. Up until the 2000s, industry standardization groups were formed by companies which acknowledged that they need to team up and cooperate with each other to establish a mutual standard across several market-segments. Nowadays we have companies who participate in those standards but don't contribute their work back to it, in hopes to secure a competitive advantage with a closed ecosystem. What happens instead, is that they force other equally-large players to develop another proprietary standard to match them, and now the standards body is unable to find common ground between all members anymore. Apple is the most egregious example of this, extending the Bluetooth spec in proprietary ways and not contributing any substantial implementation of it back to the standard (proprietary fast-pairing, linking BT-pairing to the Apple-ID instead of the device,...) In today's times, Bluetooth wouldn't even be a standard. There would likely be equivalent wireless specs from Apple, Google/Qualcomm and Microsoft/Intel, none of them would work properly with each other because each team has its own set of accessories to sell...
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoI haven't tried a bluetooth device in years, is pairing still godawful? I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing. I don't care if it requires the hassle of occasionally having to plug something in to pair the two devices as long as it works 100% reliably.
- MilanTodorovic 1y agoPairing mostly sucks with low quality adapters which have all sorts of timing issues. Some decent ones are perfectly fine.
- BuildTheRobots 1y agoI wonder how much of it is low quality adapters vs poor drivers. Whatever Bluetooth module they used in my £20 Chinesium car stereo connects quicker and works with less niggles than any other device I've tested in the last 20 years.
- bschwindHN 1y agoThe nintendo switch pro controller is nice for this - plug it in via USB and it automatically pairs to the console you plugged it into.
- 7373737373 1y agoDoes this finally fix the shitty audio quality when using a wireless headset's microphone?
- carlmr 1y agoThe only important question.
- hanikesn 1y agohttps://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/cutting-the-wire-without-cutting-the-audio-quality/4447942 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/c... This can already be done with LE audio, support is coming slowly.
- jofzar 1y agoI can't believe in that blog they use a simulated video. How hard is it Microsoft to have literally someone talking in a mic connected to two different laptops seriously.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoIt isn’t. It’s that when you have legal agreements with guilds and unions, even produced promotional material can be considered a production requiring minimum staff (I.e. makeup, camera technician, etc.) On productions, any person wearing multiple hats is tightly controlled. A cartoon I watched growing up ran into this when they needed to insert live action, so they deliberately recorded at 1 FPS for that episode to make it ineligible for budget reasons (https://phineasandferb.fandom.com/wiki/Tri-Stone_Area https://phineasandferb.fandom.com/wiki/Tri-Stone_Area). If you’re ever wondering why a company can’t do something simple and obvious, it’s probably due to a legal agreement.
- rat9988 1y agoWeird tangent here. Nobody expects software engineers to participate in a promotional video for their product.
- Fokamul 1y agoBT standard wasn't even that bad, from security stand-point, the worst thing is implementation and maybe only SW implementation. Televisions(eg.: LG) where you're unable to turn BT off. With that knowledge, you can buy cheap device which is normally used for development and analyzing of BT communication. And with that device, you can spam any TV around you with fake BT connection requests, TV is basically unusable during this time and best thing, this cannot be blocked :D (only way to turn BT off on LG TV is with you getting root and downloading homebrew app, which of course degrade the use of your TV remote, because it uses BT)
- shelled 1y agoI worked in BT almost a decade ago for 4-5 years. My first job. I had never worked close to the hardware. It was nice. Even though the work was not assembly-level close to hardware. Then the rot hit. I saw BT had been there more or less for decades and in one way or another it was going to remain there. The big bad world of backward compatibility and having to support older devices out in the wild was so crucial (as per the companies' POV and I am not judging it either way) that I realised I do not want to keep copying and pasting one line for a driver fix from one code base to 373 for different devices. Given it could have been improved with CI/CD and better source control (maybe!) but it was just not worth it. Then the rest of the software world hit hard, and I saw, yet again, that the grass is green and that at least the world of BT had epic job safety, slow but stable growth, and best of all - no rush to fix something in the next 37 mins or millions of ad revenue will be lost. But I see, as I had guessed, not much has changed "more or less" :) I blame Apple as well, or both Apple and SIG for not making adoptions faster. But then Apple had nothing to worry about when it came to backward compatibility. So "Apple-rest" never really happened in a meaningful way, and whatever happened happened quite late. (By the way there are more details on SIG portal if one is interested. Here are some https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-core-6-2-feature-overview/ https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-core-6-2-feature-overvie... and https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/just-released-bluetooth-core-6-2/ https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/just-released-bluetooth-core-... and maybe follow from there)
- noipv4 1y agoHow much more innovation can this tiny slice of 2.4GHZ spectrum support?
- nixpulvis 1y agoWhy do you assume innovation and new frequencies are all that related. There are some things new frequencies can help with. Higher bandwidth, lower congestion, but there's also problems with penetration and range. Meanwhile, the protocol itself is packed with modes and features.
- ezfe 1y agoIt's a joke?
- The_President 1y agoRange is a great metric to advertise. Like a cord on a tool that is 30% too short, bluetooth could air clean audio a little further. 300 feet in open air helps with field practice, yard work, etc. where transmitter is further.
- Waterluvian 1y agoIt’s wild to me just how much Bluetooth can do. When it was new my mental model had it binned as a “basic comms within 10 feet”. Last week my kid got to the bus stop before “Controller Disconnected” revealed the PS5 controller was in his backpack.
- 1y ago
- russdill 1y agoPlease Bluetooth devices, give me some options on how to interact with devices I've previously paired with other than "upon spotting, immediately begin playing music"
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoI wish bluetooth was more like "air usb"
- hackmiester 1y agoIf this is happening on iOS, then your peripheral is sending a Play command upon connection. (I don't know about Android but I assume the same.) This is often desirable, but I could see why it would piss you off.
- Y-bar 1y agoI have a pair of such wireless speakers, and experience it, and the engineers at the speaker company which the the customer support escalated me to is adamant that they do not send any such command. It stops if I change the category of the device in iOS Settings, leading me to believe the culprit is indeed Apple.
- mynameismon 1y agoWell, a good way to test this is hooking up wireshark
- hackmiester 1y agoTHAT is intriguing. Which setting makes it do it vs not do it?
- felixfurtak 1y agoBluetooth is such a shit standard. I guess we're stuck with it though.
- unethical_ban 1y agoWhy does Bluetooth do that hands free profile and low bitrate on my fedora laptop, bit not on my Grapheneos phone? They're both open source, no?
- ac29 1y agoThere's a million ways to change this, I personally use pavucontrol
- Ms-J 1y agoBluetooth is horrible and can't be replaced fast enough. It's also very insecure with rumors of that being on purpose, just like many other technical implementations. Recently: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/07/bluetooth-vulnerability-in-audio-devices-can-be-exploited-to-spy-on-users https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/07/bluetooth-vul...
- TGower 1y agoSub 1ms latency is a big deal, currently some gamers who would otherwise want wireless devices stick to wired for the latency advantage.
- Jemm 1y agoSomeone want to ELIF the USB support.