Best bluetooth usb for audio?
At the risk of sounding like an audiophile I noticed that on some bluetooth devices audio quality comes out absolutely terrible (Like radio recorded with a phone microphone). I was using a pair of Bose QC 35 headphones and on my phone they sound just fine but on my desktop which has a cheap $2 bluetooth usb the sound quality is terrible. Ok for $2 what can you expect but now I have a distrust for all bluetooth devices. How can I know if my bluetooth usb is killing the quality of audio when thats not even a listed spec on these devices. I looked in to this a little bit ago and there seem to be a few proprietary extensions to bluetooth that allow lossless streaming but they aren't well supported because they are proprietary. I understand that high quality lossy compression is pretty much the same quality as lossless but how do I find a product that uses high quality lossy compression when it seems some of them use absolutely horrible compression?
Double check it's not in handsfree/headset mode. Should be in A2DP (I think?) mode. I've had this happen before where it defaults to handsfree mode and sounds like a really old radio. Sorry I don't have any handy links, I don't use windows (assuming here) and not sure how to do it.
No real advice on lossless compression, but I was using a pretty old Bluetooth adapter in my car that recently failed. I replaced it, with a new model that's Bluetooth 4.0, and the difference in audio quality is definitely noticeable. Also recently got a USB dongle for my laptop (Win10 won't recognize its built-in BT adapter for whatever reason, and I'm sick of trying to get it to). The new dongle is also BT 4.0, but I can't speak to how it sounds through headphones or etc. because I don't use it for that. Should be similar, though. I'd make sure to get one that's 4.0. Got mine on Amazon, made by "Zexmte." I think it was around $7.00.