Comment by gucci-on-fleek
16 hours ago
FWIW, Bluetooth LE Audio [0] solves most of these problems in my experience. Battery life is way better, pairing is almost instant, you can connect to multiple devices simultaneously, the latency is almost imperceptible, etc. The sound quality is still worse than wired, but it's close enough that it doesn't bother me personally.
Very few headphones support BLE Audio, and you need to enable some experimental Bluez flags for it to work on Linux, but both of these should improve with time. But it makes such a huge difference that I'd argue that it's worth the effort, even right now.
[0]: https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enha...
Just to be clear the parent is still 100% correct that wired headphones: * Do not need charging * Are hard to lose. * Offer better audio * Never glitch out with pairing.
BLE Audio offers lower need for charging and better (but not equivalent) audio. So 2/4 are not as bad with BLE Audio (and arguably only 1 since you still need to charge). The other two 2/4 are related to the form factor. Wireless headphones have advantages but they are not the decisive winner.
Right, my point was just that "Bluetooth sucks" does not necessarily mean "wireless headphones suck", but since nearly all wireless headphones use Bluetooth Classic (or some proprietary analogue protocol), it can be hard to disentangle the two. But yeah, I agree no matter how good the protocol improvements are, wired is still better for some use cases.
Is BLE the only way for Bluetooth to have multiple connections? I'm no audiophile but in my experience, the audio quality noticeably drops when multiple devices are connected (I've only ever had at most two at a time). I reasoned out that the bits were being divided so `quality /= 2` as well. I've only ever done this accidentally so I can't be certain the connection was really over BLE.
Granted, I've only ever done multiple connections on Linux so maybe it's a Linux problem.
> Is BLE the only way for Bluetooth to have multiple connections?
I think (?) that it's possible with Classic Bluetooth too, but like everything else with Classic Bluetooth, it's kinda buggy and unreliable.
> I'm no audiophile but in my experience, the audio quality noticeably drops when multiple devices are connected (I've only ever had at most two at a time).
I haven't personally noticed any audio quality difference with two devices connected over BLE, but I've never tried to play audio simultaneously from two sources. My phone and my laptop both auto-connect to my headphones, so I usually have two devices connected simultaneously, but I only ever play audio from one at a time.
> you can connect to multiple devices simultaneously
I don't want to connect to multiple devices. I want to select one device and be 100% certain that it's switched to that device as a source. Even with 100% Apple devices this is not perfectly reliable with bluetooth.
Putting the cable in another audio jack makes it physically impossible that the audio comes from the wrong source or to the wrong output device. And it is a lot more convenient than untangling the mess once the bluetooth devices get confused about what to do and requiring you to manually disable bluetooth at some devices just so it gets the message.
I wasn't able to find the answer on that page or with google, does bluetooth LE solve the dogshit quality when using the microphone?
Yes, you can simultaneously use full-quality source and sink (speaker and microphone) streams [0]. And from personal experience, this works exactly as you would expect.
As you've seen, the documentation on LE Audio is rather horrible. The Android documentation [1] is semi-useful even on other platforms, and the official book [2] is also helpful if you're willing to wade through a ton of dense technical details, but there's not really much else available on the internet. I've had to spend an annoying amount of time tracing stuff with Wireshark and reading through the specifications [3] (which are thankfully free) and the BlueZ source code [4] to figure stuff out.
(The poor documentation mostly only matters if you're trying to do something specific; LE Audio mostly "just works" on Android out-of-the-box and Linux after you change the single config setting from [0])
[0]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2025/11/24/impl...
[1]: https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/bluetooth...
[2]: https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Introdu...
[3]: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/
[4]: https://github.com/bluez/bluez/
In my experience, it's a significant improvement, but I wouldn't call it a solution. If non-LE drop in quality is like 1/10, with LE it's like 6/10.
I should point out that unlike the other reply I haven't really bothered researching it at all, I just upgraded from a non-LE pair to a LE pair recently.