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

Hello guys,

I just found a way to make my AirPods 2 work fine in Windows 10. Integrated laptop bluetooth won't work unfortunately, I got the same behavior as you : very poor audio quality in Zoom and Teams using the "AirPods hands-free AG audio" peripheral.

However, if you use a headset USB dongle like the Jabra Link 370 to associate your AirPods, it will work perfectly and you won't have to switch between the peripherals as only the Jabra Link is seen by Windows.

I still need to test it more in the coming weeks with real calls but it looks good. The only problem I noticed is that the double-tap feature for play/pause won't work anymore.

That is exactly the right question. 

There are situations with different BT headsets, that provide acceptable Mic quality together with good Audio sound - but not with my AirPods and my Windows 10 (Lenovo notebook).

All workarounds with external (USB) Mic are not suitable for me.

Hi Rene,

thank you for analysis, but you have not considered two things, that were already mentioned:

• I don't have issues with HSP in principle, it's the fact that this profile comes with the lowest imanginable audio quality, I don't like.
• there are Windows 10 Systems capable making connection Airpods with an acceptable recording quality (16000Hz, my HP EliteDesk 840)

Of cause, there are a lot of workarounds, Stereo Profile with room/camera mic would work for most, ...

What I cannot underdstand, that there is no official information about how to use a quite standard component (BT headsets, e.g. airpods) in quite standard PC environment with reasonable audio and speech quality.

What is it, that makes some/most Windows 10 installations decide to connect BT Headsets in Handsfree with the lowest quality?????

wk

Hello,

I have studied this in-depth since the same issue appeared with my AirPods and I can answer your question. 

There is no way you can get both good sound and capability of recording with your Bluetooth headset (meaning any device with speakers and microphone) at the same time. The fault is not on Microsoft's side, although their optimization and integration in Windows is rather sad. Let me explain in a more detailed manner.

When you first connect your headset to any device, two Bluetooth profiles are installed. One of them is called A2DP (stereo) which is optimised for sharing audio, but only works one way (can only share sound). The second one is HSP (headset profile) which works both sides, sharing your voice and receiving sound from PC, at the expense of sound quality.

"Okay but it works on my Android device, iOS device, Linux and MacOS device!!! It must be Microsoft's fault!!!"

Well, yeah, but no. As I mentioned before, Microsoft did not optimise this well. Other OS's did better job at masking that you can't get both good sound quality and microphone at the same time. Notice that if you turn on some music on your phone (with your Bluetooth headset on), it is great quality (A2DP). But once you go into your voice memos application and start recording, the music stops. That is because in order to record sound from your headphones, the profile needs to be set to HSP. If the music did not stop at the time of recording, you would be hearing the same sound you be hearing from your Windows PC. I also tried the same thing on my MacBook - played a song, everything was perfect. When I started recording a voice memo, the sound was terrible, but just as I finished recording, the profile changed back and the audio was all clear again.

So what does Windows wrong?

The problem is that Windows just lets you set manually whether you want to you want to use the A2DPor HSP profile and is unable to switch it automatically. I do not know why it can not have this functionality or why it has not been added already, but I am not qualified enough to answer for Microsoft.

Solution? 

The best thing you can do without investing any more money in your setup would be to just manually switch between these two profiles (you can do that in sound settings.) It is sub-optimal since you won't have neither great sound nor great microphone, but hey, it's wireless.

If you want both great sound and sound great, you will have to buy a cable microphone that will stand on your desk. Audio will still be wireless and in great quality (your voice is recorded through the standing microphone, so the headset does not need to switch to HSP.) 

Thanks a lot for this detailed explanation. I can speak for most of us here that your explanation helps this issue make a lot more sense so thanks for writing your post. Hopefully, Microsoft can implement this automatic switching which is on other OS to solve the issue someday