Valve activates bluetooth in Steam Controller

#5546673 Posted on: 05/14/2018 06:33 PM

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Even those mentioned Marshall headphones have AptX. That itself is not problem. Problem is that regardless to what device you connect those headphones to, they will present themselves as 3 devices.
One for playback and two 8kHz for communication. It is poor design.

So I looked for expensive ones, $700 headsets had same stupid problem.
So I looked for Gaming headsets since gamers kind of spend time on voice chat while playing. Cheapest BT headset which works properly costs $330 (SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless), but that's no longer something what you would wear outside for comfort of not having cable.

#5546680 Posted on: 05/14/2018 07:02 PM

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Even those mentioned Marshall headphones have AptX. That itself is not problem. Problem is that regardless to what device you connect those headphones to, they will present themselves as 3 devices.
One for playback and two 8kHz for communication. It is poor design.
But if the other end doesn't support aptX, it doesn't matter if the headphones have it, thereby resulting in worse quality.

I don't understand what the problem is with the 3 presented devices; to my understanding, they only activate when needed, so it's not like they're affecting the quality of the primary stereo playback. If you don't want them to activate, just simply disable them.
For example with car head units, there's one BT connection for stereo audio, one for mic+mono, and another for steering wheel input controls. The 2 audio connections cannot function simultaneously; one will override the other. But let's say you never want phone calls to be answered through your car's sound system, you can go in your phone's settings and disable the mic+mono device. It won't have any effect on your other devices, but now whenever you receive a call, it will be answered through the phone itself.

#5546687 Posted on: 05/14/2018 07:19 PM

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But if the other end doesn't support aptX, it doesn't matter if the headphones have it, thereby resulting in worse quality.

I don't understand what the problem is with the 3 presented devices; to my understanding, they only activate when needed, so it's not like they're affecting the quality of the primary stereo playback. If you don't want them to activate, just simply disable them.
For example with car head units, there's one BT connection for stereo audio, one for mic+mono, and another for steering wheel input controls. The 2 audio connections cannot function simultaneously; one will override the other. But let's say you never want phone calls to be answered through your car's sound system, you can go in your phone's settings and disable the mic+mono device. It won't have any effect on your other devices, but now whenever you receive a call, it will be answered through the phone itself.
How do you want to use it for playing games on PC then? Have you noticed that there are competitive games on android with voice communication too?
It is design choice to disable 44kHz channel and enable 2x 8kHz channels instead. There is no physical limitation preventing device from keeping 44kHz playback and opening 2nd 8kHz channel for microphone.

With cellphone and wired headphones /w mic... You pick a call, audio is automatically paused, but in middle of call, you can unpause audio and continue listening to music.

With those flawed BT headsets, you can unpause music too, but it will go into 44kHz channel which is ignored. And apparently, last thing you want is to listen to music via 8kHz channel.

#5546692 Posted on: 05/14/2018 07:33 PM

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How do you want to use it for playing games on PC then? Have you noticed that there are competitive games on android with voice communication too?
It is design choice to disable 44kHz channel and enable 2x 8kHz channels instead. There is no physical limitation preventing device from keeping 44kHz playback and opening 2nd 8kHz channel for microphone.
Ah get what you're saying now. You want the high-quality stereo and the mic support simultaneously? In that case, I could definitely see how you're having issues. For whatever reason, I wasn't making the connection that this is what your goal was - I've never known anyone who attempted that (with BT) so it just never occurred to me.

I have a suggestion of what might work (though probably not): get a 2nd USB BT adapter for your PC, and have that connect to the headphone's mic, while the primary BT adapter connects to the stereo. I'm not confident that'll work though, since the mic might just disconnect the stereo output.

Haha another alternative would be to have 2 BT headphones, one for the mic and one for good audio quality. I don't see why that wouldn't work, but it sure isn't practical.

That is a pretty bizarre problem though - doesn't sound like that difficult of a problem to fix (EDIT: for the engineers, I mean - obviously nothing you can do about it).
With those flawed BT headsets, you can unpause music too, but it will go into 44kHz channel which is ignored. And apparently, last thing you want is to listen to music via 8kHz channel.
Yep I've had that happen to me.

#5546733 Posted on: 05/14/2018 11:30 PM

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Bluetooth, when working perfectly, "barely" works so I would be shocked if their own wireless wasn't already far superior.

To me, bluetooth is mainly useful for wireless phone connections. File transfers are good for small files. Using bluetooth wireless computer components leaves much to be desired. Music through bluetooth sounds worse (in car, though a wireless speaker or on headphones). It pretty much always sounds better and is far more reliable through a wire.

Still, I'm glad we have a fairly universally adopted standard so we can do this wireless stuff at all. Someday, we'll get something better. I hope.