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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #40
t_mann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'It's not Bluetooth's fault, everyone is just using it wrong' does not sound good.

I mean, if I give you a hammer, and you use it to drive nails by hitting them with the handle, then it's not really the hammer's fault, is it? What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any different? Also, Bluetooth isn't a single product made by a single company that dictates the standard and has the golden implementation. To have Bluetooth audio between your phone and you PC for example, you can have differ…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by chasil »

nine_k wrote: post #54

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer. My take from comments here and my experience: - Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB. - Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-st…

Bluetooth devices will "frequency hop" in a schedule to which they both agree. Noisy frequencies that result in lost data will be removed from their scheduled shifts.

There are only a maximum of 79 channels switched 1600/second, and if there is more noise than not, then the data rate will suffer, although updated modulation standards might compensate, if implemented.

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

#63

Post by aki237 »

turtleman1338 wrote: post #19

Bad audio quality with bluetooth on phones is mostly a myth. Todays smartphones only have cheap digital audio converters(DAC), so that you usually get higher quality music with a proper bluetooth codec like aptx.

But... Does the quality of a phone's DAC matter? I was under the impression that Bluetooth is digital audio. And the quality issue is with the bandwidth mostly or the headset DAC sucks.

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

#64

Post by goldcd »

turtleman1338 wrote: post #19

Bad audio quality with bluetooth on phones is mostly a myth. Todays smartphones only have cheap digital audio converters(DAC), so that you usually get higher quality music with a proper bluetooth codec like aptx.

I think codecs are where I have most of my remaining BT annoyances. AptX is great (but there's also AptX HD, AptX.. is it variable? etc) - and exactly which AptX is supported varies by the Qualcomm chip in your phone and the device you're connecting it to. Or you can go with Sony's LDAC. Works great on my Pixel, once I've turned on "quality" in the Sony App, then turned on the LDAC opton that gives in my bluetooth settings (and optionally can go into the dev menu each time I connect, to adjust the bitrate).

I do like bluetooth - but working out what features will work with which devices is a PITA. It always falls back to something functional, but fallback masks a lot of improvements that could be made. Although maybe that's the right approach. It works, and if you're somebody who likes to fiddle, you can.

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

#66

Post by andy_ppp »

I’m building something that uses Bluetooth and largely for the classes of device I’m using everything seems to work fine? Isn’t all this like everything, largely Apple and premium devices work well and cheap crappy stuff barely works? Sort of implies it’s not necessarily the the standard at fault…

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

#67

Post by tobyhinloopen »

andy_ppp wrote: post #66

I’m building something that uses Bluetooth and largely for the classes of device I’m using everything seems to work fine? Isn’t all this like everything, largely Apple and premium devices work well and cheap crappy stuff barely works? Sort of implies it’s not necessarily the the standard at fault…

AirPods Pro still randomly fail to connect to my iDevices.

Other devices will randomly connect and disconnect to othet devices in my house, announcing the connect and disconnect every time even though the connection isn’t used

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

#68

Post by shakna »

m12k wrote: post #21

I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?

> I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified

Absolute opposite. The blutetooth spec is one of the most hideous, largest specs you have ever laid eyes on. The full spec, very heavy, very particular, is in excess of a thousand pages.

If you "just implement the spec", you have an enormous team and budget. But, you'll still end up in a hole, because not everyone agrees with what the spec is actually saying, because it's too complicated, and too large. So there are parts which are in direct competition with each other, leaving you to have to guess an answer - knowing that there is no market agreement for what is the "right" answer.

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

#69

Post by jacquesm »

nine_k wrote: post #54

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer. My take from comments here and my experience: - Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB. - Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-st…

> It's like phone chargers before USB.

No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

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

#70

Post by Aeolun »

gfrff wrote: post #35
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…

My $400 Bose headphones have worse range than my cheap MPow headphones. Perhaps whatever great thought Bose puts in doesn't result in great products....

Or the improved sound quality comes at a cost?
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