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What’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

What’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 ago
I 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 ago
  On 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 ago
    https://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 ago
      That 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 ago
I'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 ago
Every 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 ago
  But 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 ago
    My information may be a little out of date, but in Bluetooth there was two types of audio.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 ago
      The 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 ago
        mSBC 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
try 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 ago
  That'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 ago
      It 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 ago
      It 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 ago
Bluetooth 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 ago
  Is 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 ago
  How does wifi support multiple gigabit now while Bluetooth can’t support a microphone that isn’t horrendous?
  - systemz 1y ago
    In 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 ago
  But 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 ago
  No, bluetooth has enough bandwidth for 990kbps LDAC, so it should be possible to do 128kbps stereo + 64kbps OPUS mono mic.
ACCount37 1y ago
LE Audio fixes it, but almost nothing supports LE Audio as of yet.
beAbU 1y ago
Airpods 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 ago
I 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.

mrcsharp 1y ago

I 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 ago
On 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 ago
  https://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 ago
    That 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 ago

I'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 ago

Every 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 ago
But 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      mSBC 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago

try 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 ago
That'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 ago
    It 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 ago
    It 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 ago

Bluetooth 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 ago
Is 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 ago
How does wifi support multiple gigabit now while Bluetooth can’t support a microphone that isn’t horrendous?
- systemz 1y ago
  In 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 ago
But 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 ago
No, bluetooth has enough bandwidth for 990kbps LDAC, so it should be possible to do 128kbps stereo + 64kbps OPUS mono mic.

ACCount37 1y ago

LE Audio fixes it, but almost nothing supports LE Audio as of yet.

beAbU 1y ago

Airpods 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 ago

I 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.