Is it possible to use a bluetooth headset mic while having High quality sound

Question

I have a Plantronics BackBeat Sense SE bluetooth headset. When Connecting it to Windows 10, it installs two profiles in Playback devices list:

1. PLT_BBTSENSE Hands-Free.

2. PLT_BBTSENSE Stereo.

The Second one (Stereo) is set to be the "Default Device" and the "Default Communication Device" on the system.

At this point the sound works great and normally. The problem happens when I want to use the mic. When I start any program that uses the mic (recorder, chat, VoIP Calls, gaming, etc.) The sound suddenly stops working And I can only use the mic until I stop the recorder or the call.

The thing that kind of fixes the problem is setting the (Hands-Free) as the default device. I can hear the sound when I do that and it works with the mic but it becomes Very bad quality.

What I became to understand is that bluetooth had different profiles for sound and mic: A2DP and HSP. The first handle the voice(High Quality) but the latter handles the mic and reduces the sound quality.

Is this really the case? Is there anyway to make them work simultaneously? Is there any solution to this problem at all?

Solution

Short:

No

Long:

There are so called Profiles in Bluetooth, and only one can be active at a time.

A2DP supports one-way HQ audio.

HSP/HFP support two-way audio, but only in a shitty quality (HFP 1.6 added mSBC, which is a 16kHz mono codec, before, it was even worse).

(ref http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3399361/bluetooth-headsets-high-quality-audio-microphone-simultaneously.html)

(I added the same answer to both Is it possible to use a bluetooth headset mic while having High quality sound and Bluetooth handsfree better quality because they are found using google.)

Comments

[Admin]

I'm having the exact same issue with a Sennheiser Momentum wireless 2.0. I've also seen that windows uses HSP to handle communications through the mic. But according to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…), the A2DP profile can also handle the microphone. Also when I use the microphone with my mobile phone, the quality is very good (as expected). So I wonder if there's a way to configure windows 10 to use A2DP for both audio streaming and microphone communications.

[Admin]

It has been about 4 months now. I hope someone will answer eventually.

[Admin]

ipetitions.com/petition/duplex-high-quality-audio-for-blueto‌​oth - basically there's no way to do it right now without using proprietary solutions such as Creative headsets, which kind of suck because they're geared toward the cheap end of the market.

[allquixotic]

The tomshardware post says there's not enough bandwidth, which is not correct. Bluetooth Classic supports bitrates up to 24 Mbps, which is more than sufficient to carry two stereo streams with a low-latency, CD-quality codec like Opus at around 192 Kbps each. The total bandwidth use would be under 400 Kbps, or 1.6% of the theoretical throughput of Bluetooth Classic. This would allow reliable transmission even with very low signal strength.

[DavidPostill]

Please do not post the same answer to multiple questions. If the same information really answers both questions, then one question (usually the newer one) should be closed as a duplicate of the other. You can indicate this by voting to close it as a duplicate or, if you don't have enough reputation for that, raise a flag to indicate that it's a duplicate. Otherwise tailor your answer to this question and don't just paste the same answer in multiple places.

[Ramhound]

I can provide the exact reason, submitting the same answer to multiple questions is not allowed, 2 years later now two answers contain a dead link instead of just one.