[vbezhenar]

Apple did not even bothered to implement proper codec support for their flagship airpods. When I enable mic, audio quality goes to zero. Where's their proprietary standards when they're needed?

[pohl]

Isn't that more of a bluetooth issue? You're switching from one audio stream to two. Each now has only half the available bandwidth, at most.

[vbezhenar]

That's bluetooth issue indeed but Apple could have implemented some proprietary extensions when both devices are Apple ones.

[pohl]

I see. So they're damned if they embrace a standard, and they're damned when they don't.

[Reason077]

Wow, Apple's own headphones have that issue as well? I thought it was just my Sonys that did that!

[gruez]

That's the case for all bluetooth headphones. The reason is that when microphones are enabled, the codec gets downgraded to some crappy one (presumably to free up bandwidth because there are two audio streams?).

[Reason077]

The issue isn't really bandwidth - it's about the host and device agreeing on a suitable codec.

On a Mac, my Sony headphones will fall back to the SBC codec if the mic is active. Fine for voice, but music/video/gaming sounds terrible. On Android, however, they will negotiate bi-directional AptX or some similar modern codec, so the quality is much better.

[sudosysgen]

Fun fact though, on Linux you can force high-bitrate SBC on almost any headphone to get almost the same result as AptX.

[srrr]

SBC and aptX have the same quality (at the same bit rate). You are most likely talking about SBC XQ and aptX HD: http://soundexpert.org/articles/-/blogs/audio-quality-of-sbc... & https://habr.com/en/post/456182/

[sudosysgen]

Indeed, however the AptX family has other codecs that support even better quality (AptX Lossless) and lower latency as well as adaptive bitrates, so modern AptX support is still better (hence almost as good)