Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#11

Post by vel0city »

As for multiple headsets to one device, a lot of devices have challenges playing a certain audio stream to multiple output devices. For instance, my laptop has a speaker and my monitor has a speaker. There's no default way in Windows to play the same audio out on both of these outputs. I would need software to emulate a sound device and end up duplicating the stream to both other sound devices to target both outputs at once. Its been a while but I think that's also true on MacOS, its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux distros, its true on Android. You might have issues outputting to multiple headsets depending on your chipset, but the first level limitation is really more on the operating system side of things.

As for "can't connect multiple devices to one headset", as mentioned by others you can do this if you get the right hardware. I have a few headsets which support multipoint.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#12

Post by Jenk »

Why did Betamax lose out to VHS? Why did MiniDisc never take off? Why does the internet still rely on JavaScript?

From my sideline perspective it's probably because Bluetooth was developed without knowing how successful and expansive its use would become. It was developed by mobile phone companies to connect wireless earpieces to mobile telephones, and that was it. The entire scope of the product that is Bluetooth. They didn't even expect it to be used for stereo (or more channels) audio, _just_ for telephony ear pieces.

It has since been used for many things that it just wasn't engineered to do.

However, it _is_ (or rather has become) a rather ubiquitous protocol through lack of alternatives, and now is the must-use option for any hardware vendors wanting to connect to nearby devices. Pragmatism/apathy.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#13

Post by navjack27 »

For audio devices like speakers or headphones I've thought about an idea for playing music at least. You could have the host device send the playback device the files and the playback device would play the file locally and it would be synchronized with some sort of a timestamping routine between the host and the playback device. There wouldn't be any need to transfer data in real time in high bandwidth between them so you could have lossless audio. Being able to play back a majority of audio codecs shouldn't be all that hard or license encumbered. Even if you take a shortcut method and just transcode everything on the fly to flac. You maybe only need to store the current song that you're playing back. Heck you could extend this so it doesn't need to be built into the headphones or the speakers as a protocol and it could just be like one of those portable Bluetooth things that you can buy that you could plug any audio device in except it uses this new thing.

But the touch on all of the things that you brought up in your original post related to like real time audio. I swear there are implementations where multiple headsets on one device or multiple devices to one headset do exist. I don't think the problem has much to do with Bluetooth as a standard even though the standard is extremely complicated I think it all has to do with software and implementation on the part of the host device like the computer or the phone and the playback device. Like if there was a standard reference device example for both of these things that did everything correctly I'm pretty sure all of the things that you brought up work. Although I would like to be corrected on this.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#15

Post by [deleted] »

navjack27 wrote: post #13

For audio devices like speakers or headphones I've thought about an idea for playing music at least. You could have the host device send the playback device the files and the playback device would play the file locally and it would be synchronized with some sort of a timestamping routine between the host and the playback device. There wouldn't be any need to transfer data in real time in high bandwidth between them s…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#16

Post by BrandoElFollito »

noir_lord wrote: post #5
david927 wrote: post #2

There's a long list of comments in that thread discussing "why" it's the case, with most simply saying "it's difficult." I disagree. I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate. It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if t…

> It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop. Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues w…

This reminds me when our president (France) announced the quarantine and schools shutdown.

While my children were yelling their joy (we could hear all children in the neighborhood), I sat at Amazon to order three 20 m ethernet cables. They were part of our home decoration for a year and a half, laying across the house to reliably connect to the switch and fiber.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#18

Post by 3pt14159 »

schaefer wrote: post #14

We do have something better! And we’ve had it for decades. It’s a cable.

Wireless wins for all my uses.

I can easily bike with my Beats wireless headphones.

I can easily run.

I can get up from the computer while watching a YouTube show or if I'm in the middle of a video chat and still want to listen in while I make a quick tea or something in the kitchen.

I've literally gone swimming with my wireless headphones. Heads up front crawl, but still. These things are awesome. Why on earth would I want to be shackled with my computer or phone or worry about tripping on a cable while exercising?

To me the hard part is finding the right headphones. Sound quality isn't perfect, but a reliable bluetooth connection and easy ergonomics for skipping a song are near-perfect on these Beats.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#19

Post by giantg2 »

Are any of these problems actually Bluetooth problems? It seems the data protocol works just fine. It appears to me that the various devices just handle the associated tasks poorly. Eg you could take a call on your phone while playing music on your computer, if your phone had the functionality to send the music via Bluetooth and keep the phone conversation separate.

Re: Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

#20

Post by AlotOfReading »

We don't have anything better because radio silicon is a terrible industry to be in. The amount of institutional knowledge and capital required is insane, and the network effects on the protocol are massive.

The flip side is that consumer electronics manufacturers are horrendously cheap when it comes to BOM cost. If your component doesn't directly provide a feature list item consumers will recognize, it's not going in the device. Similarly, consumers don't care about radio protocols that aren't universal. This leads to a chicken and egg problem where manufacturers won't introduce new things, and when they do consumers won't use new things because new things don't stick around.

As for why BT sucks, it's a combination of very few chipset manufacturers (at one point it was basically just Broadcom and CSR, now both part of Qualcomm) that suck at software owning the entire market, legacy protocol design decisions constraining future capabilities (this is why audio sucks), and simply being too complicated.

Post reply on HN