4 ms·

Does this finally fix the shitty audio quality when using a wireless headset's microphone?

carlmr 11mo ago
The only important question.
hanikesn 11mo ago
https://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 11mo ago
  I 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 11mo ago
    It 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 11mo ago
      Weird tangent here. Nobody expects software engineers to participate in a promotional video for their product.
      - ashtakeaway 11mo ago
        Weird response here. Everyone expects at least some level of marketing for their software product to perform financially.
        rat9988 11mo ago
        That's a pretty weird response indeed. Swe are not part of the marketing department.
  - zamadatix 11mo ago
    Can a bluetooth mic connect wideband to one laptop and normal to another at the same time? Regardless, the simulation is very accurate IME. It is, after all, all digital anyways.
phire 11mo ago
I believe this has already been fixed by LE audio. But support (on both ends) is quite rare, experimental, and needs to be explicitly enabled.
- tecleandor 11mo ago
  It's been difficult for me to find headphones with LE support. And also I've seen some of them announced support, just to remove it later because the firmware was behaving so bad. Haven't checked in a while, so I don't know if is there something reasonable now that doesn't cost like $500 or so.
  - izacus 11mo ago
    Yeah, my experience has been that bunch of features just don't work when LE is used. E.g. on my WF-1000XM5, I can't use multipoint connection, lose per-headphone/case battery status, Voice Assistant support and some other details.
  - tasqa 11mo ago
    The WF-1000XM5 beta Bluetooth is pretty good in the latest firmware update. Even though it is listed as beta I use it all the time. And they are pretty decently priced at the moment
  - OliverWich 11mo ago
    Yes, very frustrating... I was on the lookout for new headphones that "just work" and LE Audio / LC3 support was a must for me. One of the more frustrating tech shopping experiences I've had so far. Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio. They have some interface problems (Auto-Pause and automatic speech detection is way to sensitive for me) but you can tweak it so it does "just work" (mostly).
    - ac29 11mo ago
      > Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio. I recently got the Tour One M2 and was pretty disappointed with the audio quality (both normal bluetooth and LE audio). Noticeably worse than my previous wired headphones, which were also cheaper. The touch controls are also terrible, and I dont like that noise cancelling is on by default with seemingly no way to change the default setting.
dev1ycan 11mo ago
Yeah this is a dealbreaker, same with when I found out my sennheiser headphones made me have like 500ms reaction time on audio cues, I get it was an older bluetooth protocol but yeah... no, I'll stick to wired for my pc. Oh yeah I also LOVE Teams and Meet completely breaking my mic forcing me to use some other mic because it doesn't work with the one on my headphones half the time
- miki123211 11mo ago
  Old Bluetooth basically uses an equivalent of TCP, retransmissions and all, for one-way, high-quality audio.. Any network / audio / telecoms engineer will tell you how bad of an idea this is.
high_na_euv 11mo ago
Fix quality?! It does not work at all!
ChildOfChaos 11mo ago
I just bought a separate mic to attach and it works so much better, the modmic or tonor tgp1 are the way to go.
reegnz 11mo ago
The trick I'm using (at least on laptops, cannot do this on phones AFAICT) is to change the input device to the laptop's own microphone to get my earphones to not use HFP (Hands Free Profile) and instead stay in a better quality codec (AAC, LDAC, AptX, SBC, whatever your devices agree upon). Sound quality for my calls on both sides improved dramatically! Since I've discovered this, I tell all my colleagues in our zoom meetings to switch microphones and it's immediately better for everyone on the call (not just the user that was using HFP). This is because if you use the hands free profile, it'll use a codec that encodes your voice in a terribly bad bitrate, and even worse, the sound you hear in the headphones is also using a terribly low bitrate. They should finally fix HFP (Hands Free Profile) spec as it's literally impacting call quality for billions of people. Edit: apparently LE audio is a thing, but device support is still terrible.
- HPsquared 11mo ago
  HFP has less latency though, doesn't it? And using the headset mic is probably better if the room is loud or has poor acoustics.
  - reegnz 11mo ago
    To be fair, even with no noise, the HFP has such bad encoding that it doesn't mean much if the room is noisy or not. Also the sound isolation tech should be orthogonal to using HFP.
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > And using the headset mic is probably better if the room is loud or has poor acoustics. Not to mention the combination of "microphone in the laptop body + person who doesn't turn off their microphone when they're not speaking + person who seems to never stop typing during a call" tends to be distracting at best.
    - reegnz 11mo ago
      Bluetooth codecs/profiles do not enforce social norms. And I hope they never will. EDIT: they also won't get rid of useless meetings where people are not mentally present but do other stuff instead.
coldtea 11mo ago
That has not been a problem since ages. If it is, it's on the headset.

carlmr 11mo ago

The only important question.

https://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 11mo ago
I 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 11mo ago
  It 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 11mo ago
    Weird tangent here. Nobody expects software engineers to participate in a promotional video for their product.
    - ashtakeaway 11mo ago
      Weird response here. Everyone expects at least some level of marketing for their software product to perform financially.
      - rat9988 11mo ago
        That's a pretty weird response indeed. Swe are not part of the marketing department.
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  Can a bluetooth mic connect wideband to one laptop and normal to another at the same time? Regardless, the simulation is very accurate IME. It is, after all, all digital anyways.

phire 11mo ago

I believe this has already been fixed by LE audio. But support (on both ends) is quite rare, experimental, and needs to be explicitly enabled.

tecleandor 11mo ago
It's been difficult for me to find headphones with LE support. And also I've seen some of them announced support, just to remove it later because the firmware was behaving so bad. Haven't checked in a while, so I don't know if is there something reasonable now that doesn't cost like $500 or so.
- izacus 11mo ago
  Yeah, my experience has been that bunch of features just don't work when LE is used. E.g. on my WF-1000XM5, I can't use multipoint connection, lose per-headphone/case battery status, Voice Assistant support and some other details.
- tasqa 11mo ago
  The WF-1000XM5 beta Bluetooth is pretty good in the latest firmware update. Even though it is listed as beta I use it all the time. And they are pretty decently priced at the moment
- OliverWich 11mo ago
  Yes, very frustrating... I was on the lookout for new headphones that "just work" and LE Audio / LC3 support was a must for me. One of the more frustrating tech shopping experiences I've had so far. Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio. They have some interface problems (Auto-Pause and automatic speech detection is way to sensitive for me) but you can tweak it so it does "just work" (mostly).
  - ac29 11mo ago
    > Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio. I recently got the Tour One M2 and was pretty disappointed with the audio quality (both normal bluetooth and LE audio). Noticeably worse than my previous wired headphones, which were also cheaper. The touch controls are also terrible, and I dont like that noise cancelling is on by default with seemingly no way to change the default setting.

dev1ycan 11mo ago

Yeah this is a dealbreaker, same with when I found out my sennheiser headphones made me have like 500ms reaction time on audio cues, I get it was an older bluetooth protocol but yeah... no, I'll stick to wired for my pc. Oh yeah I also LOVE Teams and Meet completely breaking my mic forcing me to use some other mic because it doesn't work with the one on my headphones half the time

miki123211 11mo ago
Old Bluetooth basically uses an equivalent of TCP, retransmissions and all, for one-way, high-quality audio.. Any network / audio / telecoms engineer will tell you how bad of an idea this is.

high_na_euv 11mo ago

Fix quality?! It does not work at all!

ChildOfChaos 11mo ago

I just bought a separate mic to attach and it works so much better, the modmic or tonor tgp1 are the way to go.

reegnz 11mo ago

The trick I'm using (at least on laptops, cannot do this on phones AFAICT) is to change the input device to the laptop's own microphone to get my earphones to not use HFP (Hands Free Profile) and instead stay in a better quality codec (AAC, LDAC, AptX, SBC, whatever your devices agree upon). Sound quality for my calls on both sides improved dramatically! Since I've discovered this, I tell all my colleagues in our zoom meetings to switch microphones and it's immediately better for everyone on the call (not just the user that was using HFP). This is because if you use the hands free profile, it'll use a codec that encodes your voice in a terribly bad bitrate, and even worse, the sound you hear in the headphones is also using a terribly low bitrate. They should finally fix HFP (Hands Free Profile) spec as it's literally impacting call quality for billions of people. Edit: apparently LE audio is a thing, but device support is still terrible.

HPsquared 11mo ago
HFP has less latency though, doesn't it? And using the headset mic is probably better if the room is loud or has poor acoustics.
- reegnz 11mo ago
  To be fair, even with no noise, the HFP has such bad encoding that it doesn't mean much if the room is noisy or not. Also the sound isolation tech should be orthogonal to using HFP.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > And using the headset mic is probably better if the room is loud or has poor acoustics. Not to mention the combination of "microphone in the laptop body + person who doesn't turn off their microphone when they're not speaking + person who seems to never stop typing during a call" tends to be distracting at best.
  - reegnz 11mo ago
    Bluetooth codecs/profiles do not enforce social norms. And I hope they never will. EDIT: they also won't get rid of useless meetings where people are not mentally present but do other stuff instead.

coldtea 11mo ago

That has not been a problem since ages. If it is, it's on the headset.