My unit has abhorrently bad Bluetooth audio quality. I know it’s my laptop and not my headphones because the gap between my phone + headphones & laptop + those same headphones is absolutely massive. The bass is almost nonexistent and the mids & highs sound tinny. I thought it was a driver issue, but updating the drivers didn’t help at all. My unit is from batch 3 if that matters. Its also got 3.06 bios.
if your headphones are airpods
Apple have a dedicated special Bluetooth audio format that any other bluetooth module (unless Airport cards) cannot support. So when paired to other devices, they will not use the superior AAC but instead older (and worse-quality) codec.
Airpods and Beats use this Apple codec (alongside the fallback codec).
Here is a non-exaustive list of bluetooth audio codecs.
aptX; aptX HD; SBC; AAC; LDAC; LHDC; LC3
… yeah.
It also depends on your WLAN/BT card. My Killer 1535 don’t have any problem, but a cheap Intel Wifi might not carry it well.
That sound like your phone/headphone has an auto/custom audio profile when paired.
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My headphones are Raycon earbuds (E55). I’m using the Bluetooth card that came with the pre-built Framework and the (good) sound quality is consistent with my desktop, Android, and Nintendo Switch. I don’t have a single Apple product. I’m using Windows 11 on both my laptop and my desktop.
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Make sure that it’s not set to use headset mode instead of just stereo output – using the headset mode will limit it to abhorrent bitrates because of some older bluetooth headset specs.
You can check by opening the sound control panel and making your default output the stereo output instead of the headset output.
In fact, if you don’t plan on using the microphone on your earbuds at all, then you can just disable the headset mode and not bother with the problem again.
This was a great suggestion, as I had forgotten about that one, but it doesn’t even have headset mode as an output option, only input. I even checked to make sure that the input responded to sound. The output is at 16 bits, though. I don’t know what’s up with that.
I remember when my Bose Soundlink (the extremely ancient soundlike, the AE 2) pair to a Windows 10 computer it will show two devices.
One device (if chosen as audio output) will pass through microphone to your speaker, which will induce noise and flatten the sound which make it sound like radio
the other device will be good sound but do not have microphone
The headset mode (that it doesn’t have) IS the shitty one. The only option for output on this particular laptop is the good one. It’s still locked at 16 bits, though. When I say locked, I mean the only options are 1 channel 16 bit and 2 channel 16 bit.
To be honest, this sounds more like a Windows 11 problem than a Framework issue - just doing a google search on new Windows 11 bluetooth issues gives a ton of results. Have you tried doing something like this reddit post suggests?
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¥€$!!! IT FINALLY WORKED! Thank you!
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