Specification vs Implementation v2

This is an update to the blog I posted back in 2016.

I do lots of conference calls everyday. And my trusted audio gear has been the Jabra Speak 510. It works over Bluetooth. It  also provides great audio quality. But it could not do both at the same time. For the audio to be good, ti needs to connect to a computer over USB. To my surprise I saw it working without the tethered USB connection. Digging deeper unveiled it working over Bluetooth, but using the special Jabra Link USB Bluetooth dongle. Digging even deeper the dongle appears to implement a full Bluetooth Audio stack and presents itself to the host computer as an audio device (a sound card), not a Bluetooth adapter.

So clearly it seems the Jabra implementation of Bluetooth audio is superior compared to the Windows implementation: you cannot achieve good audio quality pairing the speaker with a computer, but you can (using Bluetooth) if you use the Jabra dongle. In other words, the reason the Jabra dongle exists is the poor performing Bluetooth stack on Windows.

To test my theory, I attempted to pair the Jabra dongle with a non-Jabra speaker: the Beoplay P2. And I failed. The Jabra stack crashes when attempting to pair: the dongle disappears from the list of USB Audio devices as soon as it receives an advertisement PDU from the P2. Crap...

I found other companies offering similar high-fidelity Bluetooth audio dongles, and based on the USB-C form factor I decided to give the Plantronics BT600 a try. It paired with no problems with the Beoplay P2. And guess what - the participants on the other end of the conference link reported the sound quality to be very good. I have also succeeded pairing the BT600 with the Jabra, even with the Jabra 710 series, and they worked beautifully, including the option to link two units together to provide stereo sound. Clearly Plantronics  is doing the same tricks, which come down to high quality implementation of the Bluetooth stack.

So here is the bottom line: the specifications for Bluetooth audio allow for great performance and user experience. Some implementations (widespread) provide sub-par quality and this often earns Bluetooth a bad name. It is a real shame. Wouldn't it be great to be able to connect a laptop to a speaker over Bluetooth using the built-in adapter (rather than an external USB one)? It would... But so far the dongle seems to be the only option to get things working....