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Topic: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality) (Read 6272 times) previous topic - next topic
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Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Hi all,

Now before anyone kills me for owning Beats, I know they are a 'paying for the name' job but I do also have a set of Shure SRH840's and soundmagic E80's.

I got these studio wireless titanium a few weeks back because I just fancied some bluetooth headphones for work and these were on the shelf.

My question is regarding music quality over Bluetooth.  Obvious this is subjective which is against the rules, but it sounds pretty good to me. When I connect them with cable, its definateley louder and I think there is more 'detail' there... But my hearing is awful so may be wrong.

So can someone enlighten me on the technicalities of streaming audio over bluetooth to these headphones?

My phone is a Oneplus 3. My source is FLAC rips from the app Poweramp.

So I guess the question is, how much quality am I losing with this combination?

Tom
Life-long Music Collection: 747GB / 25,646 Tracks & COUNTING! - 99% Lossless FLAC

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #1
I found an article which should be acceptable here:

http://www.edn.com/design/consumer/4326740/Bluetooth-Sufficient-fidelity-even-for-average-listeners-

Mention is made of the AptX flavor of Bluetooth, but note that in order to utilize this, both source and headphones need to be equipped with the appropriate chips, and the last time I checked, support was kind of weak.

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #2
If you can't tell the difference between bluetooth and wired, then you're not losing any.
It all depends on the bitrate the music is transcoded to. If both your phone and the headphones don't support aptX, then SBC is used. Nowadays, the supported bitrates are high enough to be transparent to me, but it wasn't always that way - I even made a thread about trying to ABX SBC vs. WAV in order to find out which bitrate my phone used, because it sounded horrible.

With my current phone+receiver combo, I can't tell the difference at all, so I'm actually only listening to music via BT on my phone now.

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #3
If you can't tell the difference between bluetooth and wired, then you're not losing any.
It all depends on the bitrate the music is transcoded to. If both your phone and the headphones don't support aptX, then SBC is used. Nowadays, the supported bitrates are high enough to be transparent to me, but it wasn't always that way - I even made a thread about trying to ABX SBC vs. WAV in order to find out which bitrate my phone used, because it sounded horrible.

With my current phone+receiver combo, I can't tell the difference at all, so I'm actually only listening to music via BT on my phone now.

Thats pretty much what I have read. AptX however seems to be pretty scattered in terms of support. I suppose if SBC supports a max stereo bitrate of 372 Kbps then it might be like im listening to a good quality MP3.

At least its going from FLAC to SBC, rather than a lossy format to another lossy format.
Life-long Music Collection: 747GB / 25,646 Tracks & COUNTING! - 99% Lossless FLAC

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #4
I suppose if SBC supports a max stereo bitrate of 372 Kbps then it might be like im listening to a good quality MP3.
Considering that you can get excellent quality from mp3 at 200kbps less than that on average, I should hope so!

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #5
I don't own Beats wireless phones, but use Jaybird X2 wireless earphones for exercising.
They are, to me, of entirely sufficient audio quality, i.e. there is nothing distracting me from enjoying music of any genre. No details are smeared over, and the frequency reproduction appears neutral or slightly bass-accented.

BTW, Jaybird are explicitly not using AptX, but some other tricks to optimise SBC audio quality (no detailed info on the web site). Their argument is that their approach does not pose any requirements on the sender side, and that the resulting audio quality is still as good as AptX. Again, no studies were quoted.

I found, when trying out a few other wireless exercise-specific phones (JBL, Jam), that frequent connection drop-outs were really intrusive for me, taking me out of the music enjoyment. The Jaybirds are very robust in that regard.

Therefore, I suggest that audio quality over Bluetooth appears a solved problem these days, no matter the approach, but connection stability still can be optimized, and matters more.


Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #6
BTW, Jaybird are explicitly not using AptX, but some other tricks to optimise SBC audio quality (no detailed info on the web site). Their argument is that their approach does not pose any requirements on the sender side, and that the resulting audio quality is still as good as AptX. Again, no studies were quoted.
I'm not sure that's credible - the sender is encoding the stream, so if anything, it's the sender that could use some tricks to improve the quality. I read somewhere that some receivers also accept mp3/aac streams, avoiding the lossy-to-lossy conversion, but the sender would have to support that as well. So far, I couldn't detect if any headsets actually do that, because I can't tell opus converted to SBC from opus being played via 3.5mm jack, so I probably won't be able to tell if an mp3 is actually being transcoded or not, either.

Quote
I found, when trying out a few other wireless exercise-specific phones (JBL, Jam), that frequent connection drop-outs were really intrusive for me, taking me out of the music enjoyment. The Jaybirds are very robust in that regard.
I've had the same experience with my pair of August EP650 as well. Crappy bass aside, the dropouts were horrible on most of the phones. However, they worked flawlessly with a first gen Moto G and the first Nexus7, which made me blame the Xperia M2 and later the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 for the dropouts. However, after trying a different receiver (Samsung level link), the dropouts magically disappeared. So it seems the stack implementation and compatibility between different BT headsets and phones is not perfect.


Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #7
Well... Today I returned the Beats Studio Wireless purely and simply based on the fact that I didn't 'feel' like these headphones got close to justifying the £300 price tag.

This is obviously subjective but my Shure SRH840's make for a much more refined and detailed listening experience at home and well, my Soundmagic E80's when out are simply the best in ears I have ever owned.

I think, due to the lack of clarity surrounding different manufacturers implementation of Bluetooth audio streaming protocols, I will stick to wired connections for the foreseeable future. After all, I have cancelled all my streaming accounts and am now just relying on my FLAC ripped CD collection so I want to do what I can within reason to keep the best listening experience.
Life-long Music Collection: 747GB / 25,646 Tracks & COUNTING! - 99% Lossless FLAC

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #8
You could go the route I went and get yourself a samsung level link. Turns any pair of headphones into a decent BT headset, for around 25€ here.

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #9

Quote
I read somewhere that some receivers also accept mp3/aac streams, avoiding the lossy-to-lossy conversion,

I wonder if the second part is true.
One thing is obvious beside SBC other codecs can be used like APT-X, AAC, MP3, ATRAC.
They are not mandatory but I expect Bluetooth doing some kind of device enumeration and decide on one of the protocols in common.

APT-X and SBC are codecs,  there is a input stream that is compressed by the encoder and decoded by the receiver..
The same one can do with any other codec that fits within the bandwidth limitations of Bluetooth.

However, there is also a media player.
You chose an output device, select a song and press play.
As far as I know, at least on a PC, the media player invokes a codec, let’s say MP3, expand it to raw PCM and send it to the audio device.
If this is a Bluetooth device, there the audio will be compressed again with the codec of choice.

Avoiding lossy to lossy would mean that the media player knows that the Bluetooth radio (and receiver) are using e.g. MP3 so send all MP3 unaltered to the radio and any other format in raw PCM. 
I doubt if this is the case.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #10
I don't know, I don't even remember where I read that. For android apps, it's possible that if they are using the android media backend, the backend detects the audio being streamed via bluetooth and that the particular receiver accepts mp3/aac, so no decoding to PCM is done and the audio is sent as is. That's just a speculation on my part, though. Most BT receivers only support SBC anyway.

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #11
I suppose if SBC supports a max stereo bitrate of 372 Kbps then it might be like im listening to a good quality MP3.
Considering that you can get excellent quality from mp3 at 200kbps less than that on average, I should hope so!

Completely different codec design between mp3 and sbc (or aptx), so you are comparing apples to elephants.  mp3 uses psycho-acoustic masking.  SBC and aptx use ADPCM in order to minimize latency (and computational complexity, i.e. battery life).

But you probably already knew that.... ;-)

Re: Beats Studio Wireless (Bluetooth quality)

Reply #12


Quote
I found, when trying out a few other wireless exercise-specific phones (JBL, Jam), that frequent connection drop-outs were really intrusive for me, taking me out of the music enjoyment. The Jaybirds are very robust in that regard.
I've had the same experience with my pair of August EP650 as well. Crappy bass aside, the dropouts were horrible on most of the phones. However, they worked flawlessly with a first gen Moto G and the first Nexus7, which made me blame the Xperia M2 and later the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 for the dropouts. However, after trying a different receiver (Samsung level link), the dropouts magically disappeared. So it seems the stack implementation and compatibility between different BT headsets and phones is not perfect.


That would be an understatement. 

In addition to different implementations of the BT stack, there is the perennial problem of signal to noise ratio (SNR) trade-offs in wireless communication.  Shannon shows that as the SNR reduces, so does the ability to reliably transmit bits, i.e. lower SNR means lower bits per second can be reliably received.  In order to avoid the very-obvious (and annoying) drop outs (due to not enough bits being reliably received), a lot of devices just go ahead and negotiate the lower bitrate profile of SBC (medium quality of 229 kbps (assuming 44.1 KHz joint-stereo) instead of high quality 328 kbps profile).  So you get no drop outs, but a lower sound quality.  My Note 5 is running android 6.0.1, but often negotiates the medium quality profile.

(This is verified using this method:
http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/26410/how-do-i-determine-which-a2dp-codecs-my-phone-supports-is-currently-using/169505#169505)

However, my Note 5 also supports aptx, and when using aptx bluetooth sinks, my phone often negotiates aptx, with its higher bit rate and higher quality sound.

So, to the OP, real answer to your question is this: If your OnePlus 3 can consistently make high profile SBC connections (or aptx, if your headphones support) to your current BT headphones, then it is probably pretty transparent.  If it is only making medium profile SBC connections, then what you are getting is distortion that is pretty easy to hear (my abx results are posted in another thread, but I'll try to post sound files for you to test yourself).  You can test which codec profile you are getting yourself using the stack exchange link above; I'll walk you through it if you want some support.

As for me, I publish research papers on wireless, but use wires when I am making phone calls or listening to music.