Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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I would have agreed with you prior to Bluetooth 4.0, the LE spec.

LE is a cleanroom specification developed by Nokia and delivered wholesale to the Bluetooth SIG in 2010. It's much more limited in scope, limited in bandwidth and designed to fill a niche around low-power, low-bandwidth devices instead of F-35'ing with WiFi-type capabilities.

It'll get faster in time - each new revision brings with it a faster PHY without compromising on power consumption. It's up to about 2Mbits/sec now, as of 5.0. It's not quite up to where it needs to be to support streaming high-fidelity lossless audio, but it'll be there shortly. It's the right tool for the job - for once - we just need to let it mature a bit.

[edit] Double-checking how AirPods connect, but I'm almost confident it's analogous to LE Audio spec in 5.1

But somehow Bluetooth 5.0 cant stream compressed duel channel audio while also sending back microphone audio...

Yes, even the 5.0 LE PHY is 2Mbits/sec and I believe that's shared between upstream and downstream. We're talking a total of 175kB/sec, split up and down [1]. I doubt that's sufficient for what you're suggesting.

[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/exploring-bluetooth-5-how-fas...

you misunderstood, he means devices switching from A2DP profile to HFS/HFP the second you want to use microphone

Ah, I see, thank you.

This is purely a spec issue. At first there was the abysmal Headset Profile with audio at 8kHz (SCO Codec). Maybe that was the quality of telephony generations ago, but I find it barely intelligible (and definitely not useable). They then followed it up with the Hands Free Profile using a version of the SBC codec at 16kHz. They call it „high quality“ but it still sucks and is barely usable (that companies who are even pushing proprietary codecs for Bluetooth audio haven’t really attempted to fix this [FastStream is a one-way solution] is mind boggling to me).

Maybe, just maybe, LE Audio will not actually suck for audio recording. Maybe.

> but I'm almost confident it's analogous to LE Audio spec in 5.1

There‘s a good chance I‘m wrong here, but my knowledge is that LE Audio builds on Bluetooth Core 5.2 and no devices have shipped yet.

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