Blue Tooth Audio

If you listen closely, well, if you ever listen at all, you will notice the nasal congestion from the Bluetooth headset on the other end of the line. In my personal calls, this congestion is so bad, that I ask the other party to switch back to the regular phone. I shrug my shoulders and chalk up my experience to a cheap blue tooth headset.

Or is it something else?

When I ask about the price paid for one of these fine units, I usually get a $150 - $200 range. These headsets seem not so cheap. I think I know who the culprit is and it’s a good one. No one talks about the culprit because no one understands it. The culprit is wireless jitter.

In the telephony world outside of audio, wireless jitter is common place and all phone companies struggle to improve signal quality by lowering wireless jitter. Last year, collectively, phone utilities spent millions of dollars on their network edges to help with wireless jitter. In the early VOIP installations, you could really hear wireless jitter at its best. For example, it was hard to tell who was at the other end and it was difficult to finish a phone call without line drops.

No I am sure, as this blog reader, that you are not spending millions of dollars on your wireless network edge. But, you may be using a wireless music server, and your wireless server is just full of jitter. A simple blind comparison between a decent CD player and your server will reveal this difference.

A wireless server is great for parties, background music or any other non serious application. But to build a serious music system around a music server, I would think again. You can help the sound with some decent DACs, but I would not spend too much money. The Fathom is an all around champ on this as is the Musilands. Spending more beyond that, is a waste of money.

All the best,
Vic