I will die on the hill that Bluetooth always has and always will suck ass. Pairing sucks. Latency sucks. Random-ass disconnects suck. Fuck Bluetooth in the neck sideways with a rusty screwdriver.
The bluetooth antennas on your devices have sucked. I have no problems with my pixel 7 pro. Pairs quickly, play music from across the house, through walls and floors even. Previous phones of mine would lose connection to my bluetooth headphones if my.phone was on the wrong hip, obviously an antenna issue.
Until we can finally kill HSP/HFP, I’m never gonna be happy with Bluetooth. Using a headset mic shouldn’t blast you back to the telephone era.
What’s hsp/hfp?
It’s the Handset Protocol/Handsfree Protocol that was developed for simultaneous sending and receiving of voice data. They’re the only protocols that support sending and receiving voice at the same time, and they do that by sending mono telephone quality audio and receiving mono telephone quality audio.
It’s why most gaming headsets, even ones with Bluetooth, include a small RF dongle separately. Bluetooth is technically incapable of high-quality audio when recording.
I’m talking phones to cars (for hands-free and music), mice to desk and laptop, earbuds and headphones to both, keyboards to anything from computers to fire TVs, BT speakers, adapters for older receivers… They all suck. Multiple phones, devices and cars. (although the 2012 Chrysler was the worst so far, and the 2021 Subaru is better)
BT on my 2016 Subaru has been solid. Actually there’s some sort of bad connection in the data path so the BT is more reliable than the wired connection
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Don’t forget that the data bandwidth is so low it can’t play higher quality mp3s.
Depends on the particular device. LDAC has been around for years and supports higher bitrates than mp3s (assuming we’re putting 320kbps mp3s in the “higher quality” category)
LDAC is a very inefficient codec, and isn’t lossless even at its highest bitrate. But they are all close to perceptually lossless even at relatively low bitrates so it’s a much of muchness.
3.5mm gang
I have had no pairing issues with anything since 5.0. Also, a good set of buds 5.2 or more doesn’t have much lag. I wouldn’t pc game with it, but beyond that it’s good. Vlc let’s you easily offset audio and whatever netflix does stays synced real nice for me.
Buy cheap shit, get shit results.
Wouldn’t say I buy cheap shit, not Apple (I’m not Musk or Bezos rich), but flagship Samsung and pro earbuds, Logitech trackball, jbl speakers, and headsets from Bose and Jabra. Now the BT receiver for the stereo, that was cheap Amazon garbage. I’ll give you that one.
Bought a Bluetooth headset 5 years ago, never had a problem with it 🤷 fuck cables
I mean my AirPods are fantastic. I think they’re great at playing my podcasts and I’ve not had any problems with random disconnects. Granted I’ve only ever used them with my phone but still.
Shiny new AirPods + shiny new iPhone = minimal issues. Certainly preferable to cords for many, even if no dongle were required for many corded headphones.
In fact AirPods + iPhones have been all but rock solid for years, at least since first gen kinks were worked out… so five years worth of high reliability.
My AirPod Pros have also worked perfectly on my Linux PCs - just as solid as connecting to an Apple device.
That is great to hear. Do you still have to pay the Apple tax if you want the full experience of say using your computer with the AirPods, getting a phone call which pauses your music and having them automatically switch over to the phone until you end the call?
Apple uses a modified version of Bluetooth
Edit: for Apple-only version
Every version of Bluetooth since 1.0 has been a modified version of Bluetooth.
No one uses standard bluetooth. I’m pretty sure it can only transfer files in its base form
That’s absolutely not true. Bluetooth has many “profiles” which define different capabilities. Here’s a list of them. These are all defined in the official bluetooth standards.
Maybe you were thinking of the “core specification” which defines the underlying protocol but doesn’t define the profiles? But that’s just the way they broke up the spec documents. The profiles are still official parts of bluetooth.
Apple’s proprietary extensions for audio are not part of any official specification though.
Thank you for the correction. I was indeed thinking of the profiles and misremembered how it all works.
Exactly. I just click a button on my laptop and it pairs. Start playing a video on my phone? It instantly jumps to my phone. No lag, no pairing waiting. Didn’t want that? Click the “connect” button on the laptop bc it just noticed that it jumped to my phone. My Apple TV notices when the AirPods are around. Did I ever have to pair them to the Apple TV? No! They’re connected to my account and can see the other devices easily.
This shit right here is why people buy Apple. You sell your soul to the devil and get convenience in return.
Don’t get me wrong - both my work laptop and my gaming PC run Linux. But my phone is still an iPhone and if I ever have need for a personal laptop again, it’s gonna be a Macbook Air again.
I get the same seamless switching on my cheap soundcore headphone, so it’s not just Apple devices that can do this. What Apple is good at is consistency in its reliability. On other ecosystem, it can be a hit and a miss.
Exactly. I fuck with software and device issues all day at work. I don’t want my free time to always be fucking with my phone. I was jailbroken for so long back in the day but it’s just a hassle now when I just want to go home and relax.
Not sure what your use case is (or what devices you bought) but I only ever experienced some disconnects from a crappy AliExpress speaker. For the rest, in my 14 years or so of using BT regularly, I have never had any of those issues you mentioned
I agree with the rest but it absolutely does not just randomly disconnect
I haven’t had it randomly disconnect, but I certainly have had my headphones randomly connect to my phone in the middle of a video call on my laptop. The crappy multi-device support for Bluetooth is the bane of my existence.
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I have all kinds of cable extensions specifically to reduce my reliance on BT. Wired bedside headphones and keyboard are the best
Im using cheap chinese thing, rarely have problems
I just want a headset that doesn’t descend into hissing at me in mono over a crackly 1940s phoneline whenever I dare to use the microphone.
Check what BT profile your OS is switching the headset to (and what your headset can actually support). I use HSP/HFP with mSBC codec and it keeps pretty OK sound while in “headset mode”
Both of my Galaxy Buds sporadically losing signal when I have my phone in a pocket.
The phone has to go in the hat. It says so in the manual.
Jup, same here. But when I change it to the other pocket it’s all fine. Strange stuff. (The right front pocket works so much better than the left front pocket of the pants)
I have some B&W Px2s and they’re fine when using the microphone, although the sound quality is the main selling point.
Any of the AirPods that go in your ear have exceptional microphone quality.
I find it hard to believe every pair of headphones you’ve ever tried has been trash, unless you’re just buying trash quality and expecting amazing hardware.
Sorry for linking to the alien, but see this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/44sxms/bluetooth_headset_goes_to_low_audio_quality_when/?rdt=57825
As I understand it, standard Bluetooth cannot support quality audio and microphone.
That said, lots of phones and headsets secretly support non standard profiles if you use the right hardware together, but at that point you can’t know if you’re going to get quality with your setup unless someone’s tested it thoroughly and half the time reviewers are either deaf or lying
As I say I’ve had no issues with AirPods and my current B&W are passable.
Sure for audio quality isn’t as good Bluetooth as wired but as some who listens to a lot of classical I don’t really have the ears that can distinguish between different bitrates.
I’m no audiophile either, I don’t care what profile it’s in in normal mode, but everything is instantly a disaster in headset mode.
I know AirPods have some non standard support to escape the Bluetooth mess on apple hardware.
I want a headset that works on windows, my phone, and mac, which means I’m stuck with standard support, which basically means I’m stuffed.
With airpods I could see that on an iPhone, but if I remember correctly even on Macs the issue is present.
No phone aux jack conspiracy has re-entered the conversation
Anyone know what kind location accuracy Bluetooth 5 currently has?
According to the below two articles. It’s 1-5 meters in optimal conditions. And some of it may require additional hardware for tracking.
https://www.u-blox.com/en/technologies/bluetooth-indoor-positioning
https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/bluetooth-low-energy
In my case it’s about a football field lol
Thanks for digging those up! I figured it was somewhere around that range. I’ve had it be fairly accurate within a couple feet, but I’ve also had Bluetooth proximity show much further.
I thought we were still in 4…
Why would you need centimeter-level accuracy?
Very nice for home automation- have your music and lights follow you around the house for example. Check out Room Assistant
Sounds kind of like room-level accuracy
Yes, that’s what they strive for today but generally are not able to achieve. Better accuracy on the tracker would allow better accuracy on the room tracking, since to do that you essentially need quite accurate triangulation. You’ve got to multiply the innacuracy of 3 trackers together and that’s the innacuracy of the whole system. If each can be off by one meter, then you have a ~3 meter circle in which the thing can actually track you with confidence. Which is not enough to reliably say which room you are in. a 3cm circle would definitely be enough. Probably you could get by with up to 5-10 cm and still do pretty well.
So you know which sofa cushion the EarPod is under
Ask JD Vance?
FindMy tags? Like the ones Pebblebee and Chipolo make.
Or you could just get a Moto tag, which already supports Google FindMy and has centimeter accuracy thanks to UWB
Bluetooth seems to propagate down the product line faster than UWB, so for people who wants budget devices but also have more accurate tracking functions, this might be better.
Not all phones have UWB. On the other hand, they do have Bluetooth.
Some phones have UWB. Zero phones have Bluetooth 6.0
Well yeah, it hasn’t been released yet. Is this your idea of a joke?
It’s not a joke. UWB adoption could easily stay ahead of Bluetooth 6 adoption. There’s nothing requiring phone manufacturers to always update to the latest Bluetooth, just like there’s still not very many 5G mmWave phones available.
It could go either way. Bluetooth 6 might be more familiar for manufacturers to implement, but if the hardware is different to support the accuracy, who knows?
“easily”? Please, name one device that has UWB and doesn’t include bluetooth.
Besides, if this is included in 6.0 and assuming it does cost much more per chip, where’s the harm in having a better feature set? This seems like an incredibly pointless discussion.
This is why I turn off Bluetooth before heading into the supermarket… <tips tin foil hat>
No tinfoil hat needed. Retail stores are equipped with bluetooth beacons that tracks and monitors customer behavior. This in turn can be sold for targeted advertising. Another scary thought is that the tracking is so precise, it measures the distance your phone is from a product, including height. How high is the phone from the ground? The data points can be extrapolated to influence product placement: what products and prices influenced a customer to bend down and look at/interact with the product? How long were they in close proximity with the product? Based on the phone’s orientation, were they bent down to look at or passing by the product (indicating that they stopped for a separate reason and not necessarily for the product)? Did they buy it? Were they looking for coupons in my “retail store app” while next to the product, or somewhere else in the store? Where do customers often stop or gather in order to browse through coupons? Could we place Y products there? Where should we put the product in stores to maximize sales? What ads can we send to them as they arrive at the store? Based on aggregated data with the rich profile we built for this customer, are they likely to sign up for our rewards credit card? What is this customer’s income level? Have they purchased X product recently? What part of town do they live in? What products are popular there? Et cetera ad nauseum.
Tracking is so predatory. Makes me look at my smart phone with disgust as the years go by, and I periodically grapple with the decision if a smart phone is even right for me or if it’s time to stick to a computer and a truly dumb phone going forward.
Some public info about Bluetooth beacons: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html
Want to find Bluetooth beacons? Simply install a Bluetooth scanner app from your phone and head to a store to see them.
Here’s how Shopify engages businesses on how to utilize Bluetooth beacons with their software package. Bought anything online? That site was most likely powered by Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/retail/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-beacon-technology-for-retail-stores
<Replaces tin foil hat with Fedora>
Thanks for all this info - I feel less crazy now!
Some supermarkets are using digital price displays now. Can’t wait for the “adaptive pricing” like the personalised advertising in the film Minority Reports!
Here comes Bluetooth MAC address: DE:AD:BE:EF. He often pauses near the chocolate biscuits so likely buys some. Lets update the choc biscuit pricing removing the sale pricing as he’ll buy them at full price anyway…
These beacons are small, inobtrusive electronic devices that are hidden throughout the grocery store; an app on your phone that communicates with them informed the company not only that you had entered the building, but that you had lingered for two minutes in front of the low-fat Chobanis.
Well that solves the problem. Don’t let sketchy apps access your Bluetooth/location
They don’t have to be connected to see your device. Just like how Find My Device works by searching for the Bluetooth signal. You’d need to have Bluetooth completely off, so no smart watches or headphones for you in the grocery store I guess.
Indeed! If Bluetooth is enabled on your device it will send beacon/polls and so be visible.
The recent “Find your offline devices” enhancement to Android’s Find My Device app has made me wonder if having Bluetooth off is even enough?
Exactly, and this is additionally why it is predatory: you can’t opt out.
It’s similar to Facebook. If you never in your life ever created a profile, well, Facebook has one for you regardless.
The only way you can opt out of bluetooth beacons is to not bring your phone/smart watch/etc, or have either a hardware switch that disables your network functions or put it in a faraday cage. Also, because of data profiles and associations, if you’re walking into a store with your partner, expect that your partner should do the same or else it’s all moot. You’re associated with your partner and thus tracking and profiling occurs anyway.
Yay technology!
<sigh>
iBeacon and Eddystone
Add in the facial recognition technology they’re also deploying and go to the next level of Dante; what do people’s habits who look like “x” who are with people(kids, partners, friends) who buy “y” and don’t buy “z”?
Wait, don’t Bluetooth devices randomize their macs like wifi to hide their identities from unpaired devices?
Well, lucky for you, it’s all camera based now.
Thank Covid that surgical masks in public are a thing!
I don’t actually wear a mask shopping nowadays but some of those who have been around the sun many times do. Perhaps we should?
I lost my watch in snow in forest once. Had to use one of those finder apps, centimeter level accuracy would have saved 2 hours
I’d like something like a ring or wristwatch that unlocks my PC when I’m close enough to the keyboard, and locks it again when I go away. For that tracking would be pretty good.
Track the dog.
What is making my excited is the potential to use this for indoor position tracking for placing persistent virtual displays.
Car
audio latency when
When you read the article:
We also get latency improvements through Isochronous Adaptation Layer (ISOAL) Enhancement. This allows the Bluetooth device to cut larger data frames into smaller chunks while ensuring its timing information remains accurate. This would help reduce latency and potentially make Bluetooth audio devices a viable solution for wireless audio, especially in gaming.
That was unnecessarily snarky, but I couldn’t help myself. I don’t even know what any of that means or if it will actually actually reduce audio latency.
The “especially in gaming” bit is encouraging. That might mean they are finally, after 26 years, addressing the demand for good quality, low latency, multichannel, full duplex audio…
…but I won’t hold my breath. They seem to think gaming means playing on hardware like this.
My layman’s understanding (so please correct me if I’m wrong) is that BT audio works by taking the audio stream from your playing device, and breaks up pieces of that stream into small packets. These packets get sent individually to your speaker, which then plays them all seamlessly in order as they flow in. But because these packets have to be cut out from the main stream in the first place before they can be sent, you’re always hearing something from just a few moments ago, as you can’t start playing a packet until it’s finished playing and transferring from the main device, first.
So by breaking these packets up into smaller pieces, you’re reducing how far back your speaker is, chronologically-speaking. So let’s just say that the current version of BT breaks up audio into 0.5-second increments (it doesn’t, this is just an example). This means that every 0.5 seconds, your device snips a half-second of audio into a packet and sends it to your speaker, which then plays that packet. But the transfer takes time, too, so let’s say 0.25 seconds to send (again, just made-up numbers for the sake of explaining the concept). So everything your speaker would be playing in this situation would be, at minimum, 0.75 seconds behind. Not a huge deal for listening to music, but it quickly gets out of sync with video content.
So pretend the new BT version instead breaks up the original audio into 0.1-second increments. So instead of generating 2 packets every second, it’s generating 10. Even if we keep the same transfer rate of 0.25 seconds in mind, this reduces the delay from 0.75 seconds to 0.35, which puts the audio much closer into sync with video content.
Not bad, but you’re missing that the Bluetooth device can report audio latency back to the source so it can delay anything that needs to synchronize. In practice there’s half a dozen more buffers in between and a serious tradeoff between latency, noise sensitivity, and bandwidth.
It’s a bit delayed
I see what you did there.
A major improvement already happened in 5.2+ but few devices support it yet (LE Audio with LC3 codec).
Will the isochronous mode improvements help?
Will this centimeter level tracking only work for paired devices or will retailers be tracking us even more closely now.
Yes…
If your phone has Bluetooth turned on, it’ll track you.
yes yes yes but… will I finally be able to boot my wife off the bathroom speaker so I can play my music without running around the house naked yelling at her to disconnect?!
Bruh just press/hold the pairing button on your speaker.
As with many (all?) speakers I have had, the pairing button is the same power button. I am supposed to start with the speaker off, press and hold until it turns on and then starts pairing.
The problem is that it usually connects (to the last phone it connected to, my wife’s in this scenario) before it even gets to the pairing stage. Even if I get to the pairing stage, it still prefers the previously connected phone :-(
Two speakers seems to be the most peaceful option
Wise words my wife purposely does not accept
Well you obviously need to buy her a nice new one for a holiday
Well you obviously need to buy
hera nice new one for a holidayI will show myself out now
Bet any money that it will still cut out and have latency issues
I mean, yes, depending on the signal strength and interference. Can’t have tiny, efficient, powerful, reliable and wireless all. There are gonna be compromises.
Any decent earphones will offer different codec and encoding support for high quality, good connection, or best latency.
Who are you, mr Bluetooth??
Just kidding I hear ya, it just sucks from a UX standpoint but the world ain’t magic. I just wish we kept aux jacks at the very least smh
improves device pairing
V6 seems a little soon for this unnecessary feature. Maybe push it back a few versions.
Does it actually improve the pairing experience? I am skeptical it will make any difference.
Does it improve the bandwidth so higher quality codecs can be used without having to switch between good quality sound and shitty mics to shitty sound and good mics? I mean seriously, we’re in 2024 and we still can’t have quality parity with a wired headset when using Bluetooth because the bandwidth sucks so much ass that better codecs just can’t be used. Bluetooth can die in a fucking fire.
For desktop you can get headphones with a wireless dongle that doesn’t have to adhere to Bluetooth limitations and in fact most of them also have Bluetooth for phone use
My 300$ earbuds can play two sources at once. But an uncompressed signal? Fuck yourself.
does anyone actually want that? seems beyond the original use case
I want this for home automation.
you need cm level accuracy?
I can see multiple uses for the tech. Unfortunately, many are a but dystopian, but some are legitimately useful.
This is going to be tracking customers location in supermarkets.
Of course not, that would be immoral. They’ll track trollies and baskets, then tag it to the till and your loyalty card. It would be a lot more consistent, and harder to dodge.
Bluetooth should be killed
Why?
All my bose devices pair like a charm. One of the uphills of choosing that brand.
If you don’t mind trading sound quality for convenience, I suppose. Bose has been a snake oil provider for decades.
Til snake oil meaning. Thanks !
I’m not sure I would call Bose snake oil, but the audiophile space certainly is full of it. On the one hand, you’ve got overpriced equipment that’s not very good value but works, and on the other you’ve got literal scams like gold plated fiber optics and “audiophile-grade” network switches that are literally incapable of changing the quality of your audio because the signals are digital and have error correction, so it will either work or it won’t. Placebo effect + choice-supportive bias are enough to get these things positive reviews though.
Hope it does better than 5. 5 so far chops out whenever i go to the mudroom on the other side of my 1300sqft house
