Does this finally fix the shitty audio quality when using a wireless headset's microphone?
replies(7):
This can already be done with LE audio, support is coming slowly.
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.
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).
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
It does not work at all!
Any network / audio / telecoms engineer will tell you how bad of an idea this is.
Which makes sense when you know it started life[1] as a separate protocol called Wibree by Nokia, which was specifically designed[2] to be usable by Bluetooth RF gear:
A major tenet of their design was that “it can be deployed with minor effort into devices already having Bluetooth, e.g. cellphones” with the added requirement that a “common RF section with Bluetooth must be possible”.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#History
[2]: https://www.ijert.org/research/wireless-communication-with-w...
I've tried multiple combinations with my WH-1000XM6 and WF-1000XM5, but nothing works stable on Windows. Linux requires hand-patching bluez and friends which also failed for me. Android does not support GMAP and just when using LE, a lot of messengers unable to detect it properly(Google Meet works, Telegram and Viber does not).
I've finally gave up on that idea. Just thinking about fact we cannot use duplex wireless audio in 2025 pisses me off so much tbh.
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.
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.
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).
If you’re ever wondering why a company can’t do something simple and obvious, it’s probably due to a legal agreement.
Guess I gotta correct my assumptions then, I clearly thought they did.
Regardless, microphones built-in the same body people type against will remain a personal pet-peeve for me.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.
I actually told him many salespeople get this completely wrong and sound like an absolute Muppet on their expensive headsets without even realizing it and explained to him that anything Bluetooth is basically never going to sound amazing. There’s a lot of snake oil in the market. I got some nice Sony earbuds recently. Tried it once and I was barely audible apparently. That’s supposedly a high-end option. It’s OK, I got them for music and podcasts and wasn’t expecting much for calls. But it managed to underwhelm me on that front. The weakness is Bluetooth and the standard codecs supported on Mac/Windows. You are basically screwed no matter what BT headset you use. For phones, it depends.
Apple fixes this with AirPods by doing a proprietary codec and probably quite a bit of non-trivial sound processing. None of that is part of the Bluetooth standard, and what little is supported in some newer codecs typically does not work in Windows/Mac. So it will still fall back to that low-bitrate codec that distorts your voice and makes you sound like a Muppet.
If you need to use a phone, getting a USB-C headset can be an alternative. Not that many wired headsets these days, sadly. Even Apple now uses USB-C. And both Android and iOS support most USB-based sound equipment.
I take most calls with my Mac. I configured an aggregate device with the MIDI tool so that my headset doesn’t hijack the microphone. Nice little hack if you have some decent BT headphones. On a Mac, the microphones in the laptop are likely way better than the vast majority of headsets. And that’s before you consider the latency and heavy compression Bluetooth adds to the mix.
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.
Do you have any sources for that claim?
As far as I understand (and based on what I've seen in some Bluetooth debugging menus at least a few macOS versions back), for HFP they just use regular mSBC.
That's an optional codec for HFP (while SBC is mandated for A2DP), and a step above absolute potato quality G.711/PCM u-law, but still part of the regular Bluetooth HFP specs.