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Whenever I start using my microphone in OBS, the audio quality of my bluetooth earbuds drops dramatically. OBS forums confirm:

If you experience the quality loss through a bluetooth headset, this is due to OBS initializing your mic, which makes a bluetooth headset switch to voice mode (instead of music mode), and voice mode has much lower quality. This is a bluetooth specialty, not a bug or flaw in OBS

So, what is voice/audio mode? Windows Camera seemingly has no problem recording without it, and the audio quality is dramatically worse with. Why would I ever want to use it?

b44ken
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  • Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Jan 07 '22 at 21:56
  • Quite curious where this one is going... I got a Bose QuietComfort set as a present, and the music quality is pretty bad considering it's from a pretty good brand. Wondering if it's possible to pair the same device twice, once as a headset and once as micless headphones. – MiG Jan 07 '22 at 22:00
  • Does this answer your question? [Bluetooth handsfree better quality](https://superuser.com/questions/1101560/bluetooth-handsfree-better-quality) Only one Bluetooth profile can be active at a time, and two-way audio will always suffer in quality, just due to the way Bluetooth was engineered. One way audio is usually decent quality, which may be why recording in the camera app has better quality - either that or it is not using the Bluetooth microphone when recording. – Sam Forbis Jan 07 '22 at 22:13
  • Yeah, reading up on OBS atm. Trying to figure out if it is now (2022) possible to switch BT profiles for my device, as I use it both to listen to music, and for meeting calls. I assume this is the same issue that the initial poster has. – MiG Jan 07 '22 at 22:18
  • Wondering if (temporarily) disabling the mic would have an effect. Probably not, I assume it doesn't change the profile the BT device has been set up with. – MiG Jan 07 '22 at 22:18
  • The problem is that the moment any device even attempts to use the microphone on a bluetooth headset then it will switch from A2DP (high quality audio - only being sent audio) to HFP (Hands Free Protocol - bi-directional audio) HFP is extremely low quality because you need to share the bandwidth between transmitting and receiving audio. If you can disable or block use of the microphone then that is what you need to do. – Mokubai Jan 07 '22 at 22:39
  • That said, I *would* consider this a flaw in OBS if you cannot stop it from requesting access to the microphone. – Mokubai Jan 07 '22 at 22:40
  • I just found out my earbuds actually come with a solution for this: I can connect to Headphones (Bose QC Earbuds Stereo)" for full sound quality, or "Headset (Bose QC Earbuds Hands-Free AG Audio)" for reduced but low latency sound quality. Considering meeting apps allow you to specify an audio device separate from the default windows device, I now set #1 as default when it's turned on, and starting zoom, it will use #2. Check your windows volume icon to see if the same BT device appears twice, might solve your problem if you can set your software up as above. – MiG Jan 13 '22 at 10:07

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The problem is that Bluetooth is quite limited in its data transfer rate (Theoretically <= 3Mbps / Practically < 1Mbps). This also means that protocols can either be optimized for quality or for latency.

Thats why in High quality / Music mode, Bluetooth generally has a bad latency. You can notice the latency when watching a movie: people will move their lips before you jear the sound, if you dont correct this by inserting a negative audio delay in your player.

When using duplex communication, most OEMs will think about voice calls, where a low latency is cruical (especially when connected to a phone): imagine both wearing BT headphones, it would mean the other "waiting" for 2-3 seconds before replying to you, it would be unnerving.

So, duplex codecs will focus on the frequencies of the human voice and loose details on all other frequencies. That's why Music sounds terrible in that mode.

Moreover:

Synchronous Connection Oriented (SCO) and its enhanced version Enhanced Synchronous Connection Oriented (eSCO) are the modes used for Bluetooth voice transmission. The mode allows you to transmit sound and voice strictly in order, with a symmetrical speed of sending and receiving, without waiting for confirmation of transmission and re-sending packets. This reduces the overall delay in the transmission of audio over the radio channel, but imposes serious restrictions on the amount of data transmitted per unit of time and adversely affects the quality of the audio.

See this in-depht article for more information.

For your issue with OBS, after starting the program, what you can try is go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Audio Devices and in the Recording tab, deactivate manually the microphone. It will probably depend on the driver of your headphones if this will work.

But for any professional working on streaming, video or audio I hoghly recommend wired headphones which have next to no latency and superior sound quality.

1NN
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