How to prevent audio downsampling with AirPods?
It seems that whenever I'm using AirPods (Gen.1) on an app that requires both audio output and input (microphone), the sound output seems to be automatically downsampled to what can be described as super low-quality MP3. Using e.g. the laptop microphone seems to fix the issue. This doesn't seem to happen with other BT headphones (e.g. with my Beats Studio).
Even worse, this is system-wide (e.g. bad audio quality is across apps, e.g. a YouTube tab or Spotify).
Any ideas?
While Bluetooth audio streaming quality has gotten much better with standards like aptX and AAC, the headset standard (which is required for two-way audio) falls back to standard A2DP which is much much lower quality.
AFAIK there is no solution for this aside from disabling the mic on the headphones and only using your laptop mic or another mic.
Yes, it is just a side effect of the only bidirectional profile in Bluetooth being the HFP profile, which is mono and generally sucks. You just can’t get audio that sounds better than a 2005 earpiece over Bluetooth if you need a mic. I hope there’s some serious engineering effort to fix this. I think there’s some proprietary magic that makes that work better in iOS.
The app ToothFairy has an option to force any BlueTooth audio device into “output only” mode, as a per-device setting.
You can option-click the built-in Volume menu to get to the Input selector more rapidly.
If you’re on Windows, I believe you have to disable the Hands-Free device associated with each Bluetooth device? That’s as reliable as I’ve managed it to date, anyways.
I would guess this is the expected behavior as afaik the AirPods have to switch Bluetooth profiles from the stereo audio output A2DP to the mono audio input and output HFP to allow for mic audio
I came across this problem the other day too. I was trying to make a website that used a peer to peer audio connection between clients and binaural positioning and just couldn't get it to work. I thought it was the code and after far too long realised it was just my damn Airpods switching down to mono when I turned on the microphone.
Only figured it out by listening to binaural audio in one browser window and turning on the microphone to record in another and it still stopped the binaural sound working.
No solution as far as I know, they only have 2 channels and when you need one for voice you lose one for your ears.
Turning on your mic requires real-time audio and because Bluetooth is slow, the sound is compressed.
Hq audio through Bluetooth has some latency
Apple has crippled gen 1 airpods with the 6.7.8 & 6.8.8 update. The thing just drops connections and sounds terrible. No way to downgrade them to the earlier version of frmware. Same thng with the newer airpods and ANC.
Is this solved in the new airpods pro?