this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Bluetooth has completely different design and goals. When it came out it wanted to do notifications. Nowadays it's been shoehorned into lots of things it wasn't originally supposed to do, like media streaming, controllers, file transfer etc. That's a limit to how far the spec can be twisted.
I think you're confusing BLE and Classic Bluetooth here. Classic Bluetooth was design for streaming data (serial-port emulation and voice audio) from the very first spec.
And it's always been terrible at it. And it still is. Pairing issues, overcompressed audio, dropping connections, overcomplicated protocol without universal support... I have no idea how it didn't get replaced by a competing standard.
Like Wi-Fi, honestly. How is Bluetooth not just "USB over Wi-Fi". Literally. Tunnel USB over a 2.4Ghz link. A transport layer that does transport, and then the endpoints can just... Talk to each other. It doesn't sound hard..
Instead we have a system where my wireless controller works great except with an Intel built-in BT chipset. So when I decided to play some games last night on my new TV and tried it out with my laptop, every 15 minutes or so the controller locks up and spins constantly to the right, and has to be re-paired.
Or where if I play anything with any sort of bass in my truck the compressor flattens the mids so you can't even hear the vocals, so I have to use a physical aux cord instead. Why is there dynamic range compression at all? Why is it not configurable? Why is this not just a raw PCM stream. WHY
We have had this protocol for 25 YEARS and it still works like beta
Check which codecs your phone supports and buy a Bluetooth dongle that supports an HD audio codec. LDAC and APT-X HD are almost indistinguishable from an aux cable.
But yes, even those codecs max out at a pathetic 900kbs, and only have a few feet of range at that quality/speed.