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

Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

support.logi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 280 posts

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#71

Post by CobaltFire »

phaedrus wrote: post #68
noirbot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, if you haven't run into audio or video interference on a wired device, you're lucky or have quality cables. I've definitely picked up radio stations on headphones or had nearby electrical currents induce an annoying buzz in a microphone or distort a video signal.

Got any tips for eliminating or mitigating the interference? Recently some retiree in my area got himself a new, illegally-high-powered CB radio so he can talk to truckers from his house. It comes through on the wired headphones I wear while working from home.

Find a HAM in your area and ask them to do a "Fox Hunt". Many enjoy hunting people violating the laws and giving a detailed report the the FCC, which has some rather impressive fines that they DO levy.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#73

Post by mr_toad »

SECProto wrote: post #36
LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

To summarize: If you use a Logitech bluetooth device, it creates enough interference that high-bandwidth products like the Airpods will not function correctly. If you switch the Logitech device to use their "unifying" adapter, which doesn't use bluetooth but a different proprietary wireless protocol, the problem goes away. Logitech acknowledged the problem about six months ago but thus far have deflected any further…

My favourite part about wires is that there's never interference or poor connectivity. Aux headphones, ethernet cables, wired mouse and keyboard - all so much more painless.

> all so much more painless.

Until you have to do the dusting, and you’ve got a tangle of cables in your way.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#74

Post by toast0 »

frankfrank13 wrote: post #2

If you buy a bluetooth mouse (and seemingly keyboard) from a company known for their bluetooth peripherals they will not be compatible with the single most popular peripheral in the world. I'm shocked this has gone on this long.

Is logitech known for their bluetooth peripherals? I know them for their remotes (which was an acquisition and recently shut down, boo) and for input devices, but they do wired and propreitary wireless and bluetooth. After several attempts at using bluetooth, I only use it where necessary, which is interacting between phones and cars. No mouse could be good enough that I would suffer through bluetooth to use it; I'd rather get a wifi mouse (which sounds amazingly stupid! but exists and i'd bet works better than bluetooth)

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#75

Post by denkmoon »

nulld3v wrote: post #50
denkmoon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just spent several hundred $ to eliminate EMI from my audio setup, I wish it were true :')

Are you sure it was EMI and not ground loop?

Both, I believe. Had ground-loop from my setup involving a very cheap passive mixer and a an asortment of other cheap crappy usb dacs, and there was definitely some EMI involvement as you could hear it change as I moved my cables around the tangled mess of other high speed data cabling.

Don't have the equipment to test or diagnose, but empirically, having moved to using balanced cabling from point of analog conversion all the way to amp input, there's no sounds coming out of my headphones that shouldn't be.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#76

Post by ubertaco »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

To summarize: If you use a Logitech bluetooth device, it creates enough interference that high-bandwidth products like the Airpods will not function correctly. If you switch the Logitech device to use their "unifying" adapter, which doesn't use bluetooth but a different proprietary wireless protocol, the problem goes away. Logitech acknowledged the problem about six months ago but thus far have deflected any further…

I've also found that if I used the Logitech "unifying" adapter, I _still_ had significant 2.4Ghz spectrum interference -- the Logitech adapter was causing my bluetooth headset (also in the 2.4Ghz spectrum) to have significant connectivity issues, and was also causing interference with some game controllers that operated on the 2.4Ghz spectrum in the same room. The Logitech devices connected to that dongle (an MX Master 2S and a K780) both also had frequent lag/stutter issues.

You might ask, "how do you know that the Logitech devices were to blame and not one of those other devices?"

Because I tested one-by-one removing each of the culprits and observing the results: - Just removing the game controllers from the room made no change - Just switching to a wired headset made no change - Switching the Logitech devices to bluetooth changed how _often_ the problems surfaced, but didn't remove the problems - Swapping the Logitech devices out for wired replacements solved the problem -- no more interference issues.

I've gone all wired and dumped my Logitech wireless peripherals and not looked back. It was actually what got me into mechanical keyboards anyways, and that's a fun rabbit-hole I've been enjoying.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#77

Post by technick »

I would like someone who is having this problem to look at the 2.4 ghz band with an SDR. My initial untested hypothesis is the transmit power of the airpods can't handle the frequency competition of a peripheral device that is most likely way closer to the computer than the airpods.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#78

Post by filoleg »

sdflhasjd wrote: post #24
darkteflon wrote: post #16

Anecdata, but I’ve had a terrible experience with Logitech mice on all sorts of Macs over the years - both Intel and Apple Silicon. Bluetooth is almost always a non-starter. The Unifying dongle works, but you’ll need to keep it physically close to the mouse. Unfortunately, Logitech also makes my favourite mouse - the light-weight G Pro X wireless. Their software is atrocious, too. Steermouse to the rescue, thankfully…

More anecdata, but I think this is a more general Apple problem rather than Logitech, I always had very poor performance with non-Apple BT devices with Macs - devices that work fine with a range of other computers.

I think the experiences with this might vary wildly. Not mentioning Apple bt devices, I tried using sony wh-1000xm1 (or whatever the first gen of them was called, because they only solidified a consistent naming scheme for that line around gen 2 or 3 iirc) bt headphones, hhkb2 pro bt keyboard, ps4/ps5/nintendo switch gamepads (all in bt mode), and a TE OB-4 bt speaker. No issues whatsoever with any of them.

Disclaimer: sony headphones, hhkb2 keyboard, and nintendo switch gamepad were tested on non-M1/Intel macbooks. The rest were tested on both intel and M1.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#79

Post by danachow »

altairprime wrote: post #5

I encourage only US owners of both the defective Logitech products and of AirPods, to write a complaint to the FCC reporting the problem as you experience it and asking the FCC to respond. https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new (Interference; Unlicensed.)

What do you assume that will accomplish? It’s your own Part 15 devices interfering with each other because of some shitty spec (Bluetooth) - I don’t think there’s any FCC rule breaking involved here.

I’m all for using the federal agency complaint process but this is dumb.

Re: Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods

#80

Post by junar »

cjdoc29 wrote: post #26

Of all the years I've been reading HackerNews, this is the one that moved me to actually sign up. So I have three Intel-based MacBook Pros but of different model years - 2017 (15in), early-2019 (13in), and mid-2019 (16in). The mid-2019 16in MacBook Pro in combination with Logitech MX Mouse (Mac version) and AirPod Pros cause significant interference on the microphone. The result? I sound like a "robot" on Zoom calls.…

What about using a different microphone? In my experience, listeners prefer the built-in MacBook Pro microphone over the AirPods Pro microphones. Or if you have a USB microphone, you can try that as well.
Post reply on HN