It’s not a bandwidth restriction. The device generally has adequate bandwidth.
The problem is the Bluetooth specification that’s massively over engineered. The original 1.0 Android developers specifically called out its complexity as a significant source of friction.
On Windows specifically, the audio quality degrades when you switch because it changes the Bluetooth profile from an audio device to a headset. Windows hasn’t bothered with high fidelity under the headset profile. It’s pretty bare bones, so it tries to talk to the device using a common baseline for headsets which generally didn’t support high fidelity audio for a long time. Vendors have long preferred proprietary solutions to avoid dealing with the terrible standard.
Given the stupid complexity of bluetooth, I can’t say I blame them. Microsoft needs to get around to implementing the upteenth special way of transferring audio over Bluetooth.
It’s not a bandwidth restriction. The device generally has adequate bandwidth.
The problem is the Bluetooth specification that’s massively over engineered. The original 1.0 Android developers specifically called out its complexity as a significant source of friction.
On Windows specifically, the audio quality degrades when you switch because it changes the Bluetooth profile from an audio device to a headset. Windows hasn’t bothered with high fidelity under the headset profile. It’s pretty bare bones, so it tries to talk to the device using a common baseline for headsets which generally didn’t support high fidelity audio for a long time. Vendors have long preferred proprietary solutions to avoid dealing with the terrible standard.
Given the stupid complexity of bluetooth, I can’t say I blame them. Microsoft needs to get around to implementing the upteenth special way of transferring audio over Bluetooth.