[Discuss] bluetooth epilogue

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Well, I thought I'd document my final thoughts on bluetooth.

So, as I mentioned in my last e-mail, I got an iogear bluetooth 4.0 usb 
dongle as a impulse buy the last time I was at Microcenter. That along 
with my BH-ProHT head phones.

So I reported that I was having trouble with the audio quality of the 
head set. After about 10 minutes of use, listening to an audio stream on 
youtube, the sound would start to studder and skip making it quit an 
annoying experience.

I chalked it up to bandwith issues through the USB bus and Rich replied 
saying that the audio compression was inadequate on the headphones.

So this morning I decided to do some more tests, and I boot up my 
desktop into windows 8 and gave the headphones a try. They worked fine. 
No studdering or skipping. :/

I then fired up my laptop which runs windows 7 which has a built in 
bluetooth device (intel based) and the head phones worked fine. I'm 
actually listening to the youtube audio stream which was causing the 
skipping and studdering under linux. No skips or studders. So I guess 
the headphone compression hardware or rather decompression is working OK 
on the head set.

One thing which I do notice tho is that the pitch on the music changes 
just slightly every now and then. As if the digital stream is working to 
speed up the audio stream to get it back into sync and thus by 
increasing the data rate the sound goes a bit higher. The pitch also 
dips. These pitch changes are very slight and almost unnoticeable, but 
I'm rather picky when it comes to the music I listen to I guess.

Anyway, I've decided to dump the bluetooth audio on my linux desktop and 
get a set of Sennheiser digial wireless headphone, one that doesn't rely 
at all on bluetooth and will connect directly to my audio port.

I hope this info is of use to the blu community... :)

Cheers. Steve.