alt Hacker News> Modern bluetooth is basically transparent with 256kbps AAC, like you'd have to be an omega-expert listening in a silent room to identify it vs lossless.
Sure, unless you want to do something rare and exotic like, say, have a microphone on your headset. Then you get the HFP/HSP profile, which makes two tin cans linked by a string seem high quality by comparison.
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Wait is that why my airpods (playing via my Mac) sound like crap as soon as somebody calls me? Cause the microphone turns on?
Oh my god, TIL -- thank you, brother, I've apparently been doing this incorrectly for years.
If you’re outside with a smartphone, why do you actually need that though? If you call someone, their audio will be bad anyways, and when do you need playback and microphone at the same time? Outside multiplayer gaming, I don’t really know any application where high quality audio playback and microphone is needed at the same time.
Surely it would be very rare to want to listen to music at its highest quality while simultaneously recording your voice. It’s perhaps conceivable for some sort of niche mode of music or audio production, I suppose.
I am now curious how much you can optimize the quality of a tin cans and a string. You could encode the sound digitally over the string perhaps. I wonder what bitrate (also bandwidth) you can achieve.