Comment by voidUpdate

5 days ago

I really think we need a modern replacement to bluetooth, something that doesn't have weird behaviour with headphones, is more secure and doesn't have weird connection issues all the time, and is as ubiquitous as bluetooth is now. I know it will never happen, but I can only hope

Well what's interesting to me is that Logitech has their wireless dongle and wireless gaming headphones (which need lower latency) have theirs. These have existed for how many decades? Surely there's a way to just standardize this. And it shouldn't need to be long range. Just a few meters to the tv or something.

I guess that's where Bluetooth LE and LE Audio should come in, but it's coming along very slowly or not at all in Apples case. Or maybe it is, they don't talk about it

  • If I am reading this [1] correctly, regular Bluetooth >5.0 offers transfer speeds of 50Mbits/sec, while Bluetooth LE offers 2Mbits/sec. Does Bluetooth LE even solve fundamental problems like high quality bidirectional audio?

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth#Specifications_and_f...

    • I never knew about the 50Mbaud figure, is anything above 10M even achievable in a real world scenario?

      It does solve this by having a different topology. It supports a configurable number of streams in each direction, so at least in theory 5.2 surround with a stereo microphone should be possible, we'll see if it's usable

      It also supports what is often called 'true wireless' earbuds by default, as each audio sink can stream only the channel it's interested in.

      Finally there's all that broadcasting stuff, which works fine in our tests most of the time but also with a myriad of issues, some of them in the spec, others in the Android implementation, which is currently the de facto target to support

Yes please, immediately.

It's been so terribly bad since it came out. You know it's bad when there's even an xkcd about it: this one is from 5 years ago, joking about 10 years before that. https://xkcd.com/2055/