My thoughts on BT sound quality - & how to improve it

[robjrock]

I just picked up a pair of Motorola S805s BT headphones for my P3. Because I only got an 8 giga P3 I transferred over my music in 160 kbit MP3 format. Pretty low but saves space. I would have used OGG but there are album art issues. I encoded straight from lossless FLAC files so there shouldn't be any particular loss in sound quality by re-encoding the files..

Anyway, long story short, the 160 MP3s had big big problems with the treble, especially cymbals and high hats sucked big time. I wasn't sure whether bluetooth sends the mp3 data straight to the headphones to be decoded, or whether the P3 decodes it to an analogue signal, then re-encodes it again into a bluetooth signal. According to my personal listening tests, its the latter.

Long story cut short, encoding your mp3s in a higher quality format appears to greatly improve the sound quality using Bluetooth, much much more noticeable then with wired headphones. I'm guessing when the music is sent through BT the artifacts present in low bitrate MP3s magnify when using BT. So yeah, the loss in sound quality by using low bitrates appears much worse when using bluetooth instead of normal wired headphones.

The negative I suppose is higher bitrates take up more space and use more battery.

[CrowdAds]

[Dreamnine]

Bad luck with that. I use BT speakers and hadn't noticed any SQ issues. I'm not fond of the phones due to size/comfort issues. Do you think if you re-encoded at 192 it would make much difference?

[TomCat39]

Using DNSe and Audio Upscaler makes the biggest difference.

I use BT speakers by sony and play 128Kbit CBR mp3's and they sound phenominal with this player (for 128Kbit files). It's not the BT that reduces quality, it's mp3 and not using the upscaler and DNSe 3.0.

And cheap headphones can also hurt sound quality. Just being BT headphones doesn't mean they are any better than winter ear muffs. A lot depends on what is in the cans to make them quality reproducers of audio.

[Dreamnine]

I'm not a fan of any BT headphones. To me they are just one more device to be charged, and while SQ may be acceptable as are my BT speakers, it's never going to be as good as wired phones.

[mattwalker]

I agree ... with DNSe turned on the sound I get though my motorola bt is so much better sounding

[nikc4]

Bluetooth is a low quality transfer system. No matter how good your BT 'phones are, they are still receiving a bluetooth signal, so you won't get great results if you compare them to a quality pair of wired cans (my ATH-M50, for example). It's also a waste of battery that could get you from a good 20 hours of listening time down to about 4. But, personal preference and all that, do what you want.

Nick

[TomCat39]

Originally Posted by nikc4

Bluetooth is a low quality transfer system. No matter how good your BT 'phones are, they are still receiving a bluetooth signal, so you won't get great results if you compare them to a quality pair of wired cans (my ATH-M50, for example). It's also a waste of battery that could get you from a good 20 hours of listening time down to about 4. But, personal preference and all that, do what you want.

Nick

I don't think anyone was saying that BT sound is as good as a quality wired setup. I believe they are saying that with DNSe it can really improve it from what typical BT sound is like.

Because BT compresses the sound, pitting BT to wired is like pitting vinyl records to FM radio. Not a fair comparison.

Simply, people here are saying.... As far as BT goes, DNSe (and higher bitrate) helps quite a lot.