Bluetooth Audio Quality Limits

I believe the audio quality degradation when using the mic is a limitation of Bluetooth bandwidth. It switches to a different profile capable of sending and receiving audio instead of only receiving.

The audio quality thing is a Bluetooth limitation AFAIK. There is no standard which lets you stream high quality audio bidirectionally, their high fidelity mode has only one audio stream going to the headphones.

How much does bluetooth hurt audio quality?

Yes, bluetooth has plenty of unfortunate limitations. For example, there is no standard high-quality bidi audio codec in bluetooth spec (see https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/duplex-high-quality-audi... for detailed explanation).

BLuetooth has not enough bandwith to handle that lossless audio with overall good experience, is my best bet.

It was a Bluetooth issue years ago. Now it's only an Apple issue where it can't use a more decent codec. On Linux you can choose the mSBC codec and get decent two-way quality on a modern headset.

The blog post discusses this. They have two modes - one for bidirectional audio (headset mode) where the bitrate is reduced significantly - and one for regular audio. It is made worse by the fact that sometimes the higher quality codecs are not used ie aptx.

I think you'll find that Bluetooth audio already breaks, regardless.

It's definitely not an issue with bandwidth, instead it's an issue of standardization. There just doesn't exist a bluetooth profile that supports high quality duplex audio communications between two devices. It's pathetic.

Won't the quality of the audio over Bluetooth be incredibly compressed, though?