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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

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Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#441

Post by duped »

causi wrote: post #179
blackhaz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should start a club! My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.

It's patently ridiculous how much better the microphone on $15 wired headphones is than the ones on a $50 set of wireless earbuds.

Most cheap wireless headsets are cutting the bandwidth down to like 4k for voice when you're talking.

It's also not surprising when you realize no one buying these things is testing the mic before the purchase. They probably aren't even testing how it sounds. It's hard to sell better things when most customers will never know how bad they sound, and even the ones who do probably won't care. And worst of all they'll blame zoom, or the telephone network, or their internet, anything but the cheap piece of crap mic and half bandwidth connection they're using.

Sorry for the rant. The economics of consumer audio are why I personally quit the industry. Some of these things are easy fixes but no one cares enough to make them.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#442

Post by NikolaNovak »

_fat_santa wrote: post #402
NikolaNovak wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard consistent excellent things about AirPods in terms of connectivity and listening experience for the owner :) Let me be the annoying one to say that they can negatively contribute to a team meeting experience (which fair enough, isn't what they're designed for - but what many people use them for, not just in a pinch but as primary day-long mechanism). There's only so much software can do to mitigate the fac…

I agree with the mic issue and it's not ideal, though it eventually just gets down to what you can and can't do with the hardware. I will say for me at least this is non-issue since all calls are taken in my quiet apartment.

Agreed; this is the tradeoff inherent in that hardware design; by all accounts, Airpods are the superior offering in that space.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#443

Post by Keyframe »

tpush wrote: post #425
kortex wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's intended to be homophobic. The album art is just really cringey. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_(U2_album...

What's 'cringey' about it?

The way it is.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#445

Post by a9h74j »

jtbayly wrote: post #223
jefe_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happen…

I created a one-hour long silent MP3 and named it similarly and added it to my phone. I've sent it to a friend who uses it as well.

Call it Subliminal productivity silence and you can make a fortune.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#447

Post by gedy »

swamp40 wrote: post #433
oliveshell wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what’s happening is that certain car stereos are programmed to basically send the “play” command as soon as a device is connected. From the phone’s perspective, it’s as if you had connected Bluetooth headphones and then pressed the “play/pause” button. I say this because my iPhone never autoplays when connecting to any Bluetooth audio device except for my car stereo. I agree it’s aggressive and should be ab…

Agree that a "play" command is being sent from vehicle. This autostarts Apple Music if nothing else is using the speaker.

This drives me crazy as I don't use Apple Music and I don't want to keep playing handful of songs I bought 15 years ago on iTunes. I've yet to find out how to disable this.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#448

Post by thetinguy »

roody15 wrote: post #363
blackhaz wrote: post #91

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X: The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is…

Apple has done this for years and my take is they are tying to increase usage and relevance of Apple Music. For example I only use Spotify in my car but it will not connect correctly unless I download and have Apple Music installed. Just bad move by apple in my opinion. Just connect by bluetooth and let me use any app want. Super dumb that you have to put a song labeled A in your song library that is just silence to…

It’s the car that auto plays the first thing. My old car used to do the same thing. New car no longer does this.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#449

Post by wldcordeiro »

My biggest pain point right now with Bluetooth and my phone is that it's *all* media going through the paired device. I want to be able to pin just my music app audio to go out a speaker and still be able to use my phone speaker for all other apps but that's not possible.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#450

Post by Damogran6 »

nucleardog wrote: post #338
aliqot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market wants what the other segment of the market has, that's the purpose of marketing. Phones with no jacks, like laptops with no i/o, is something impractical that people self-justify because of the logo and the clout it affords. You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone . Airpods are just about the worst headphones money can buy and people fight over them, despite…

The airpods do one thing much better than anything else I've tried: work with an iPhone. I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the…

The work every time...and my hearing is shot so the last 5% worth of fidelity is lost on me.

And my wife experienced their noise cancelling once on a flight and bought a set the next day.

And we can share the audio between two airpod things when watching a movie, but not with non-Apple products.

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