Airpods Pro: very bad quality in Headset mode on Windows 10

Anonymous

Dear all,

I've got my new Airpods Pro, they work well with my iPhone.

Also on Windows 10 via bluetooth, sound quality is good when using the "Airpods stereo" mode.

However, in the headset mode ("Airpods Hands-Free AG Audio") sound and especially microphone quality is extremely bad. I tried to change the default format (see screenshot, it's only 8000Hz), but I cannot change it as it's grey. Any advice to get a better microphone quality?

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Anonymous

According to this post it should be fixed already in Insiders Build (currently Dev Channel only).

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Anonymous

2020-12-10T11:26:39+00:00

Hi,

strange thing is, that my colleague, who uses the same Lenovo notebook (T490s) with Win 10 and a pair of Sony BT Headsets (MX1000 MkIII) has also good audio quality.

So something in conjunction of the notebook's BT device - Windows Driver - BT Headset must be weird...
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Anonymous

2020-12-09T14:18:47+00:00

Fully appreciate this won't help everyone, however I've been following this thread for several months and having finally taken the plunge and purchased some AirPods Pro I've been able to have a play.

My main use case is Teams calls / meetings and Zoom meetings. I'm pleased to say in both apps I'm able to alter the settings so the audio is routed to "Headphones" (different to "Headset" as noted in #By-Morphys post) and the Microphone is the Mic array (Realtek) built in to my Surface Pro. So this would work with any Windows laptop's built in webcam mic, or a standalone webcam.

With this combination, the audio I'm hearing is excellent, and I can still be heard clearly by other participants in the meeting using the webcam mic.

As I say, appreciate that won't help everyone as you'd need a webcam with a mic, but it's done the trick for my use.
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Anonymous

2020-12-09T13:13:56+00:00

Agreed, it's silly that AirPods and frankly any Bluetooth headsets fail to work on Windows.

From what I've seen, it's been up to the product manufacturer to build their own driver. Which Apple should do.... Still, MS should find some sort of way to make the myriad of products work in a reasonable fashion.
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Anonymous

2020-11-11T12:16:15+00:00

There is another possibility - use headphones as Stereo without mic and use a laptop's microphone. You get some freedom if you are only listening but if you need to talk, you need to sit in front of your laptop, which is quite annoying (but if you use a webcam, you will be there).

But Microsoft should immediately fix this issue and I want to highlight that the issue is valid also for other Bluetooth headsets (not only AirPods, also other vendor's headsets are facing this issue - maybe the manufacturers should push Microsoft to solve it).

I have been struggling with this topic also for some weeks now, and only here in this thread I learned, that this seems to be a Microsoft Windows issue.

Sadly no real response from Microsoft to get it solved.

The best workaround to use AirPods (Pro) in TEAMS posted here was to use an IOS device for the audio channel and simultaneously a TEAMS session on the PC or Video and screen sharing...but this is not very practical in these days...

If someone from Microsoft reads this thread: please get this issue fixed ASAP.
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