For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
Not anything to do with the LDAC codec but why does wireless headphones on windows suck. On linux (even a wm) I just turn on my headphones and it works, on windows every time I have to remove the device and add it back again
Bluetooth drivers and the firmware on devices suck. Modern Windows with Intel Bluetooth seems to work as long as your devices don’t do weird shit. Broadcom chips are often problematic as hell, sometimes requiring a reboot to work after disconnecting a device.
Linux Bluetooth audio was a struggle for years. Pipewire made it Just Work for me. It’s still relatively new, but I don’t have any complaints, unlike in the Pulse+BlueZ days.
What about wireless headphones that don’t use bluetooth? I think I had some Logitech ones that did not use bluetooth. Are those a viable alternative to bluetooth on linux?
They appear on the Linux side as USB audio devices. They work as well as they do on Linux (or Mac, or Android, or any other OS) because they don’t rely on the OS to deal with the wireless part. If they work, they work, but if they don’t, you’re usually out of luck. No settings to tweak, no channels to pick!
The Logitech protocol is more reliable than most normal Bluetooth headphones in my experience, but they also send quite a lot of data over the 2.4Ghz spectrum. That may interfere with other Bluetooth devices (though Logitech did try to prevent that) or old WiFi networks still in 2.4GHz.
Bluetooth stacks are notorious for being gargantuan spaghetti code base. People have been trying to put out all those little fires because it’s more possible on Linux than Windows.
The standards are terribly complex and the reference implementations were originally written by the standards groups.
Then to keep compatibility everything has to be broken in the same way as the reference implementations which put more effort into “it works this time” than any kind of resilience.
I was trying to connect headphones on my partners Windows machine and it was a disaster. Most of the time it failed to pair, the rest of the time it paired but didn’t recognize as an audio device. We tried with 2 different devices and both worked perfectly on Linux and Android.
It’s the same for me. I thought it’s due to the motherboard I’m using, windows being the problem never crossed my mind. The only thing that worked well and didn’t have to be re-installed after a disconnect was the new xbox controller, so I feel like maybe there’s something fishy going on here.
Its windows, at which point wasn’t it fishy?
The only thing in my head is the time where people didn’t know it had backdoors and telemetry. I think Windows XP actually didn’t have backdoors but I just assume this rn.
I didn’t have the same experience at all. I’ve used a Bluetooth Xbox controller for years, and it’s worked great… As long as it was only in Bluetooth. If you try to plug it in, let’s say to recharge it or because you want a more reliable connection, you won’t be able to reconnect it in Bluetooth, unless you unpair the device first. Apparently, that is even the _expected behavior", for some reason.
The only way to disable that behavior is to go the the Windows device settings and preventing the controller from being recognized as a USB device, so it only uses the USB as a charging port. Another solution would be to connect the controller to a power plug instead of a USB port of the PC to recharge it, but how unintuitive is that? Imagine if Nintendo, Sony, Apple or even Microsoft themselves on Xbox pulled that? That whenever you plugged in your wireless controller to your device, it suddenly stopped working wirelessly? Out of all the smaller or bigger quirks of Windows, this one has been one of the most unnerving to me for a very long time.
Soundstack has layers of legacy, old, and almost new.
Huh, it works just fine for me. I have Samsung galaxy buds 2 pro. I don’t use it with my laptop often, but it’s seamless when I do.
Windows’ built-in bluetooth stack is famously bad. Try installing the Toshiba one instead. It’s a bit clunky UI-wise, but tends to have less issues.
Do you have any guidance on how to do on windows 11?
I’m still on 10 myself so I can’t say for sure. I remember I needed to go into device manager and disable but not uninstall the Microsoft stack, and stop it from automatically updating.
It’ll break the Bluetooth settings/control panel and you’ll need to re-pair all devices via the new icon in the system tray. It looks basically the same as the old one and both might be present, so I advise hiding the old one.
I also seem to recall having to change a setting relating to the pairing password. Maybe? Sorry it’s been a while since I got it set up and it’s worked flawlessly ever since so the details are a bit fuzzy.