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Topic: EarStudio ES100 - clipping sound from Windows 10 over Bluetooth (Read 1795 times) previous topic - next topic
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EarStudio ES100 - clipping sound from Windows 10 over Bluetooth

Hello,
For over a year I've been using my beloved ES100 together with a pair of BeyerDynamic Custom Studio and I've been very happy with the combo.
I recently bought a new HP Pavilion desktop PC containing an Realtek RTL8821ce Bluetooth adapter and tried to use my ES100 Custom Studio with the machine. To my surprise the sound quality is pretty bad. It is the same with some OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z. It is especially noticeable with sounds about 8-10 KHz (cymbals, hit-hats, etc.). There is something that sounds like clipping. The Bluetooth driver is up to date. The player of choice is foobar2000 without any processing. Source files are FLAC. The problem is the same weather I choose "primary sound driver" or directly the headphones as output in foobar.
The same files sound OK on the phone with the same headphones. My previous computer didn't have these issues.
Is there anything I could do? Searching for something similar didn't yield any meaningful results.
Thanks!

Re: EarStudio ES100 - clipping sound from Windows 10 over Bluetooth

Reply #1
Check to see if your computer has any audio enhancements enabled.

Right click on the volume control icon -> Open Volume mixer -> click on the playback device -> look under the Enhancements or Advanced tab

Re: EarStudio ES100 - clipping sound from Windows 10 over Bluetooth

Reply #2
Windows' Bluetooth stack is pretty crap anyway. The only codecs it supports are SBC and AptX. SBC can sound appreciably transparent, but probably not at the bitrates that Windows uses.


 

Re: EarStudio ES100 - clipping sound from Windows 10 over Bluetooth

Reply #4
So today I checked my work laptop running Windows 10 v2004 and the everything is OK (at least with the OnePlus headphones as they were the only ones I had with me).
There are no enhancements active on either of the headphones. As a matter of fact I only have some spatial sound option.
I have tried finding out the used Bluetooth codec (on my private computer) as described here, but my logs don't contain any a2dpstreaming entries.

Tomorrow I'll take out my old laptop and try the same things on it. If I remember well, it has an older version of Windows 10.

LaterEdit: The EarStudio Android app has this interesting feature that one can see the input stream's characteristics. So I had both the Windows computer and the Android phone connected and I could see that the moment the playback started from Windows, the input stream was SBC, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz. No idea what bitrate though.

Any other suggestions as to what I could try?

Thanks!