Preparing for a long flight. Typically (on my previous laptop) my wife and I have used a 1x2 splitter and plugged our 2 headsets into that so that we can both watch movies on a flight. Also typically though, that reduces the volume, and even with noise cancelling headsets things are a bit hard to hear.
Has anyone tried to connect two headsets via bluetooth at the same time? Is there any other obvious solution I am missing?
I assume the bluetooth solution is problematic as both headsets could be trying to set volume etc - but maybe??
I’m not sure bluetooth has the bandwidth for two audio streams, but I have never looked into it.
Maybe getting an external sound DAC is a solution. It could be USB tethered, but would provide a pre-amp for your headphones. Then if you split them you have more than enough juice pushing through. Unless you are using high impedance headphones and then maybe not.
Simultaneous output of the same stream to multiple sinks was added to the specification sometime around BT 5 IIRC.
I did get pipewire to play nice with sending the same audio to two different BT devices. At first the latency was way off when I directly connected each playback to VLC’s output, but it got way better when I routed VLC->Builtin Card (monitor) → each BT sink. They’re still a tiny bit off (possibly because they were using slightly different CODECs), and its trippy as heck to listen to, especially on Emancipator’s Labyrinth, which has some interesting reverb to begin with.
But proof of concept that two different devices can be driven (almost) simultaneously through a single Framework supplied AX210 card.
So yeah, hardware and recent BT spec absolutely allow for it. Getting the software to play nice and send the same audio to two different sinks. especially with exact latency parity is definitely a YMMV situation.