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Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

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Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#141
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I look forward to the day I can leave my iPhone in a gym locker and work out with just headphones

I'd highly recommend getting a tiny mp3 player (say Clip Zip, though they are now discontinued...) and a short light headphone cable. Why send audio wirelessly when the tech to play it is as small as the receiver? There are also headphones with built in players, I don't know how the quality of those is though.

I hate wires with a passion. I don't what's wrong with me but I manage to tie, bust, wrap, tangle them in every most ridiculous possible wrong way all the time. I'm always sniping for multipairing mp3 capable headphones.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately that would require making it less complex, which is about as likely as a broken egg spontaneously reassembling. This is such a great analogy on so many levels. The natural tendency of software projects to exhibit the effects of entropy.

Best i can tell, its because humans prefer adding stuff to maintaining stuff. So things end up sprawling over time...

I was thinking about this not long ago. People also prefer buying 'more' rather than 'less but less tech debt, and more solid old'. Nature at work.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to have paired devices actually automatically reconnect without having to unpair and repair. The only things that seems to do this reliably are PS4 controllers with my PC.

It can be done with BT - the $15 headphones I buy from random Chinese sellers work fine every time. The implementations seem to be at fault, not the protocol.

I'd say the protocol is at fault if it's difficult to implement.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#146
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Headphones are the big benefactor here, for me at least. I can walk to the kitchen with my wireless headphones.

Agree, I look forward to the day I can leave my iPhone in a gym locker and work out with just headphones

If your gym has metal lockers I don't think it will happen any time soon.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#147
post #99

Forgive my ignorance, but how come the range is affected by the protocol? Wouldn't it be the aerial?

There are many things in a protocol specification that can affect range. Allowed transmission power, specifiying that compliant receivers should have X dBm sensitivity, data bit rate, channel frequencies, modulation, etc.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#148

I think a lot of the comments here could be attributed to the terrible Bluetooth software stacks that are around (Car head-decks, Android (all versions), Windows 8-10 default stacks). I've got a brand new Plugable BT4 dongle that barely works in Win 10 because Broadcom haven't updated their suite so it relies on the default 10 drivers - you can't have a HFP and A2DP service running at the same time so a headset with…

I have the same issue with a Philips SHB7150 headset. Music will play okay using A2DP (with occasional stuttering and pitch changes) but all Skype calls automatically revert to HFP (extremely bad quality). So the device has what looks like a decent microphone that is completely destroyed by Bluetooth (where in the stack this happens, I don't know).

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd highly recommend getting a tiny mp3 player (say Clip Zip, though they are now discontinued...) and a short light headphone cable. Why send audio wirelessly when the tech to play it is as small as the receiver? There are also headphones with built in players, I don't know how the quality of those is though.

Pretty much all the decent dedicated MP3 players have been discontinued. The last really great one for me was the Samsung's range (nee Yepp). But unfortunately the last one was the YP-U7 back in 2012 and it's very obvious they aren't going to make any more, even though they never announced it. Sony still does players but they're not very good.

You can still get iPods in all sizes and colors. They're pretty decent.

Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed

#150
post #6
post #2

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has already written his review: > “Next year it will work great” should be Bluetooth’s slogan. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/10/bluetooth-5

That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive. Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been…

> sound quality is flawless;

I have a headset that supports Bluetooth 3 only and audio quality is bad (especially while making calls where it chooses the HFP profile which is the only one where the mic is available).

I vouched to never again buy any Bluetooth audio devices. Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem? Should I still have hope?

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