I really wish it was easier to do high-quality audio calls these days.
It's technically feasible, apps that can do this have existed for years[1,2,3], but they're either non-free or kludgy and unintuitive as hell.
At this point, It's definitely a UX problem, not a "we don't have the tech to do this" problem.
Analog phones in the 80s sounded better than almost anything a typical consumer is likely to interact with these days[4]. Now, it's all crappy 16kHZ Bluetooth headsets, bad noise / echo cancellation everywhere, and all that encoded with some low-quality opus.
nobody seems to care about this very much. We now have devices that can go up to a few hundred mb/s over WiFi, yet Bluetooth hasn't changed much since 20 years ago, and the audio quality is basically what it was back then.
It still positively mystifies me why the only actually lossless codec used for getting data to and from a headset / earpiece wirelessly is the extremely underadopted and proprietary aptX Lossless. Like I just cannot for the life of me understand why is it so difficult to push ~2.3 megabits/sec (48 KHz, 16-bit stereo listen + same but mono mic) wirelessly in the big 2025.
Bluetooth has low bandwidth. Classic Bluetooth is 1 Mbps. Bluetooth LE can do 2 Mbps. LE Audio was introduced in Bluetooth 5.3 and starting to show up in headphones. I think LE Audio supports high quality bidirectional so that should solve the poor headset problem.
Every actor making codecs is trying to pull off an MP3, so that they extract rents from everyone else via licensing. They carpet bomb the field with patents to prevent free codecs from succeeding.
aptX is an example of an non-free codec made in this manner :)
Comments
I really wish it was easier to do high-quality audio calls these days.
It's technically feasible, apps that can do this have existed for years[1,2,3], but they're either non-free or kludgy and unintuitive as hell.
At this point, It's definitely a UX problem, not a "we don't have the tech to do this" problem.
Analog phones in the 80s sounded better than almost anything a typical consumer is likely to interact with these days[4]. Now, it's all crappy 16kHZ Bluetooth headsets, bad noise / echo cancellation everywhere, and all that encoded with some low-quality opus.
nobody seems to care about this very much. We now have devices that can go up to a few hundred mb/s over WiFi, yet Bluetooth hasn't changed much since 20 years ago, and the audio quality is basically what it was back then.
[1] https://bearware.dk [2] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti... [3] https://cleanfeed.net/ [4] https://evan-doorbell.com/wp-content/uploads/Overview-rough....
It still positively mystifies me why the only actually lossless codec used for getting data to and from a headset / earpiece wirelessly is the extremely underadopted and proprietary aptX Lossless. Like I just cannot for the life of me understand why is it so difficult to push ~2.3 megabits/sec (48 KHz, 16-bit stereo listen + same but mono mic) wirelessly in the big 2025.
Bluetooth has low bandwidth. Classic Bluetooth is 1 Mbps. Bluetooth LE can do 2 Mbps. LE Audio was introduced in Bluetooth 5.3 and starting to show up in headphones. I think LE Audio supports high quality bidirectional so that should solve the poor headset problem.
Every actor making codecs is trying to pull off an MP3, so that they extract rents from everyone else via licensing. They carpet bomb the field with patents to prevent free codecs from succeeding. aptX is an example of an non-free codec made in this manner :)