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by vladvasiliu 942 days ago
You'd be surprised. At work we get some nice-ish jabra headsets and most people wear them.

But I regularly have to take calls with people from other companies, and one in particular comes to mind where some dude never ever wears a proper headset, or doesn't know how to configure it or something [0]. We can always hear the people around him going about their business.

Then there's also the fact that people insist on using bluetooth headsets and wifi, so the audio goes in and out when it doesn't sound like a robot.

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[0] I've complained once to somebody about being unable to hear them. They said they were wearing a headset, but, as it turned out, Teams was using the laptop's integrated mic instead.

1 comments

The jabra headsets seem to insist on Bluetooth when in calls, reducing the quality back down to terrible
It needs to be a model with a dedicated dongle if you're going wireless. Otherwise for 2 way audio they switch to the Bluetooth phone call profile that hasn't improved for like 20 years.

I use a Sennheiser/EPOS DECT headset. I'd only recommend the Sennheiser ones for DECT because they have an ultra-wideband mode that actually sounds pretty good. Otherwise you're going to sound like a cordless phone.

Watch out, most Jabra headphones with dongles are actually bluetooth as per the specs. Or does the dongle do something regular BT can't do?

This was driving me crazy when I was looking for one a few months ago. Ended going with a wired Poly (the DECT models were absurdly expensive for my needs).

I do have a DECT Jabra model (with a huge base) which is nice enough for conference calls, and the mic doesn't sound noticeably worse than the newer, wired model we have at work. The headphones do have a somewhat tinnier sound, bur for conferencing they're very good as long as nobody with a deep voice breaks out some Shure mic.

The killer feature for me is the very, very low latency. I'm a non-competitive non-hardcore gamer, but I'm happy to use it in FPS games.

It also wipes the floor with bluetooth range-wise. During covid I had it at my parents' thick-walled house and it allowed me to walk around the garden during calls with no interruptions. BT can't handle me going in the next room in my small apartment.

I don't know the technical specifics but I've had a Logitech and Sennheiser BT headset with dongle. I'm pretty sure the dongle is Bluetooth but it is definitely doing something out of spec because there's a huge difference in quality between dongle and direct Bluetooth.

And yea DECT is pretty nice. I also use it for gaming occasionally.

Fortunately, they didn't drink the wireless kool-aid when purchasing these, so we have wired-only versions.