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Is it somehow possible to get better audio quality sound when Bluetooth headphones are on hands-free mode? When it is audio only, sound quality is good (16-bit 44 kHz) but when I talk through the microphone, audio quality is changed to poor (16-bit 8 kHz) like an old radio. Or I do not hear something through headphones. I have Creative Sound Blaster Jam.

Simple, have set Bluetooth Audio Renderer (Bluetooth stereo audio), for playing, with Bluetooth Audio Input Device (Bluetooth Hands-free audio), for recording?

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2 Answers 2

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Short:

No

Long:

There are so called Profiles in Bluetooth, and only one can be active at a time.

A2DP supports one-way HQ audio (unless hacks)

HSP/HFP support two-way audio, but only with very poor quality (HFP 1.6 added mSBC, which is a 16kHz mono codec, before, it was even worse).

(ref http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3399361/bluetooth-headsets-high-quality-audio-microphone-simultaneously.html)

(I added the same answer to both Is it possible to use a bluetooth headset mic while having High quality sound and Bluetooth handsfree better quality because they are found using google.)

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    The tomshardware post says there's not enough bandwidth, which is not correct. Bluetooth Classic supports bitrates up to 24 Mbps, which is more than sufficient to carry two stereo streams with a low-latency, CD-quality codec like Opus at around 192 Kbps each. The total bandwidth use would be under 400 Kbps, or 1.6% of the theoretical throughput of Bluetooth Classic. This would allow reliable transmission even with very low signal strength.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Mar 9, 2018 at 2:22
  • The Tomshardware post is no longer available.
    – Palle
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 18:24
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    so why do Android phones have no issue providing high-quality calls using Bluetooth headsets?
    – bluppfisk
    Commented Oct 28, 2022 at 8:22
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It is even more complicated: not only HFP (Hands Free Profile) 1.6 (2011), but even HFP 1.7 (2018) consider mSBC codec (the prerequisite for feature called Wide Band Speech - basically sample rate: 16 kHz / 16bit) optional in both

  • HF (Hands Free - the headphones)
  • AG (Audio Gateway - the computer, cellphone).

See Table 3.1, page 19.

Also:

Since it is only the AG that knows if wide band speech should be used, it should always be the AG that establishes the Synchronous Connection with the required codec.

2.3 d, page 16.

So it is not uncommon that the same HF working perfectly with mSBC under Android AG (e.g. Jabra Elite 65t) fails miserably under Windows 10 with mSBC and all you can do is buying Jabra Evolve 65t for 3x higher price to get the expected result. Or replace Windows with Android...

Oh, you thought of even better quality than mSBC/WBS? Unfortunately, no chance unless somebody comes with "A2DP microphone" :-(

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  • That somebody would be CSR, and it's called FastStream. Windows (sometimes in very specific conditions) was possibly the only place where you could hope to achieve this. And 10 should support both mSBC and WBS anyway, not sure why it'd be severely disadvantaged compared to AOSP.
    – mirh
    Commented Jul 31, 2022 at 21:33

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