I can't believe in that blog they use a simulated video. How hard is it Microsoft to have literally someone talking in a mic connected to two different laptops seriously.
Can a bluetooth mic connect wideband to one laptop and normal to another at the same time? Regardless, the simulation is very accurate IME. It is, after all, all digital anyways.
It’s that when you have legal agreements with guilds and unions, even produced promotional material can be considered a production requiring minimum staff (I.e. makeup, camera technician, etc.) On productions, any person wearing multiple hats is tightly controlled.
A cartoon I watched growing up ran into this when they needed to insert live action, so they deliberately recorded at 1 FPS for that episode to make it ineligible for budget reasons (https://phineasandferb.fandom.com/wiki/Tri-Stone_Area).
If you’re ever wondering why a company can’t do something simple and obvious, it’s probably due to a legal agreement.
The trick I'm using (at least on laptops, cannot do this on phones AFAICT) is to change the input device to the laptop's own microphone to get my earphones to not use HFP (Hands Free Profile) and instead stay in a better quality codec (AAC, LDAC, AptX, SBC, whatever your devices agree upon).
Sound quality for my calls on both sides improved dramatically! Since I've discovered this, I tell all my colleagues in our zoom meetings to switch microphones and it's immediately better for everyone on the call (not just the user that was using HFP).
This is because if you use the hands free profile, it'll use a codec that encodes your voice in a terribly bad bitrate, and even worse, the sound you hear in the headphones is also using a terribly low bitrate.
They should finally fix HFP (Hands Free Profile) spec as it's literally impacting call quality for billions of people.
Edit:
apparently LE audio is a thing, but device support is still terrible.
I do this same technique, but typically with external mic mounted to my desk. Another benefit beyond higher fidelity audio is that it also reduces the latency for other people to hear your audio by about 100-250ms.
> And using the headset mic is probably better if the room is loud or has poor acoustics.
Not to mention the combination of "microphone in the laptop body + person who doesn't turn off their microphone when they're not speaking + person who seems to never stop typing during a call" tends to be distracting at best.
Sure, but janky $30 wireless gaming headsets have even lower latency, with better audio quality, than Bluetooth handsfree, so it's still sad that anything still uses it.
The problem with this trick is that it's very important for your callers to hear you clearly, and laptop mics usually suck, and pick up fan noise.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.
I have a friend who works in sales and business development. He was fighting with his Bluetooth headset and his laptop all the time. I told him to just get a simple USB podcast microphone. You can get a decent one for next to nothing. Problem solved. Those are designed to make you sound good. And if you do sales, you should want to sound amazing.
I actually told him many salespeople get this completely wrong and sound like an absolute Muppet on their expensive headsets without even realizing it and explained to him that anything Bluetooth is basically never going to sound amazing. There’s a lot of snake oil in the market. I got some nice Sony earbuds recently. Tried it once and I was barely audible apparently. That’s supposedly a high-end option. It’s OK, I got them for music and podcasts and wasn’t expecting much for calls. But it managed to underwhelm me on that front. The weakness is Bluetooth and the standard codecs supported on Mac/Windows. You are basically screwed no matter what BT headset you use. For phones, it depends.
Apple fixes this with AirPods by doing a proprietary codec and probably quite a bit of non-trivial sound processing. None of that is part of the Bluetooth standard, and what little is supported in some newer codecs typically does not work in Windows/Mac. So it will still fall back to that low-bitrate codec that distorts your voice and makes you sound like a Muppet.
If you need to use a phone, getting a USB-C headset can be an alternative. Not that many wired headsets these days, sadly. Even Apple now uses USB-C. And both Android and iOS support most USB-based sound equipment.
I take most calls with my Mac. I configured an aggregate device with the MIDI tool so that my headset doesn’t hijack the microphone. Nice little hack if you have some decent BT headphones. On a Mac, the microphones in the laptop are likely way better than the vast majority of headsets. And that’s before you consider the latency and heavy compression Bluetooth adds to the mix.
> Apple fixes this with AirPods by doing a proprietary codec and probably quite a bit of non-trivial sound processing. None of that is part of the Bluetooth standard
Do you have any sources for that claim?
As far as I understand (and based on what I've seen in some Bluetooth debugging menus at least a few macOS versions back), for HFP they just use regular mSBC.
That's an optional codec for HFP (while SBC is mandated for A2DP), and a step above absolute potato quality G.711/PCM u-law, but still part of the regular Bluetooth HFP specs.
Yes, see my comment about their proprietary codec that is exclusive to Apple platforms only. Won't work on Android. Won't work on Linux. Won't work on Windows. Only works with Apple headphones with Apple phones/laptops.
For real quality improvement which is 48kHz stereo + mic, you'll also need GMAP(Gaming Audio Profile) support both on BLE adapter and headset.
I've tried multiple combinations with my WH-1000XM6 and WF-1000XM5, but nothing works stable on Windows. Linux requires hand-patching bluez and friends which also failed for me. Android does not support GMAP and just when using LE, a lot of messengers unable to detect it properly(Google Meet works, Telegram and Viber does not).
I've finally gave up on that idea. Just thinking about fact we cannot use duplex wireless audio in 2025 pisses me off so much tbh.
Worse yet, I got a new Bose headset with USB C audio support - and the microphone doesn't work at all on either the USB or Bluetooth while USB C is playing audio!
My WH-1000XM5 set broke, and it was going to cost more to repair it than buy than simply buying a new pair. So I decided to check out the cheaper end of the market, and bought a pair of Edifier W830NB.
They are pretty decent (notable downgrade in most aspects, you do get what you pay for, but good enough for my daily needs). But I was very happy to discover that when plugged in via USB-C, the microphone works over usb with full quality, that's one thing my WH-1000XM5s couldn't do, nor the newer XM6s
It's been difficult for me to find headphones with LE support. And also I've seen some of them announced support, just to remove it later because the firmware was behaving so bad.
Haven't checked in a while, so I don't know if is there something reasonable now that doesn't cost like $500 or so.
Classic and LE are completely different protocols, from physical layer and up. It must be that it doesn't make a lot of sense for manufacturers to invest substantial effort in it.
> Classic and LE are completely different protocols, from physical layer and up.
Which makes sense when you know it started life[1] as a separate protocol called Wibree by Nokia, which was specifically designed[2] to be usable by Bluetooth RF gear:
A major tenet of their design was that “it can be deployed with minor effort into devices already having Bluetooth, e.g. cellphones” with the added requirement that a “common RF section with Bluetooth must be possible”.
Yes, very frustrating...
I was on the lookout for new headphones that "just work" and LE Audio / LC3 support was a must for me.
One of the more frustrating tech shopping experiences I've had so far.
Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio.
They have some interface problems (Auto-Pause and automatic speech detection is way to sensitive for me) but you can tweak it so it does "just work" (mostly).
> Landed on the JBL Tour One M3, they sound okay and support LE Audio.
I recently got the Tour One M2 and was pretty disappointed with the audio quality (both normal bluetooth and LE audio). Noticeably worse than my previous wired headphones, which were also cheaper. The touch controls are also terrible, and I dont like that noise cancelling is on by default with seemingly no way to change the default setting.
The WF-1000XM5 beta Bluetooth is pretty good in the latest firmware update. Even though it is listed as beta I use it all the time. And they are pretty decently priced at the moment
Yeah this is a dealbreaker, same with when I found out my sennheiser headphones made me have like 500ms reaction time on audio cues, I get it was an older bluetooth protocol but yeah... no, I'll stick to wired for my pc.
Oh yeah I also LOVE Teams and Meet completely breaking my mic forcing me to use some other mic because it doesn't work with the one on my headphones half the time
