Noting that I railed against Apple’s implementation of A2DP when iPhone OS 3.0 was released last year, I was doing so from my experience with the iPhone 3G, the most prevalent model at the time. Just to confirm and keep me on record, it’s still terrible.
However, it seems that dark little example of an Apple-crafted failing user experience may well be fading into the past.
Because fast forward a product cycle and it’s apparent that the users of the iPhone 3GS (now arguably the most prevalent model) have never had to suffer like the 3G users. I played around with the 3GS last week and the Bluetooth stereo audio protocol is significantly better than the 3G. I mean, clearly, no argument. Perhaps also equally noteworthy is that the iPad’s Bluetooth stereo audio seems to be the same quality as the 3GS. So that’s something.
Now granted, if you consider an imaginary bar, let’s call it the “sounds-like-shit bar”, the 3G would reside below that bar, and the 3GS and iPad would reside above it. Whether that bar is high enough for users to actually listen to the audio that resides above it and enjoy it at length, I’ll withhold my opinion, for it lies in the realm of the subjective. Living below the sounds-like-shit bar however, I am telling you, leaves very little room for subjectivity.
4 Comments
Can you shed some light on what you think is making this difference? In your last piece you said that changing the bitrate would only see marginal improvements, so is it something different?
Could be bitrate only to make the leap. The 3G performance was terrible particularly on high frequencies, and noticeably worse than Blackberries and laptops… which for many users seem acceptable quality. Cleaning up the severely objectionable distortion that the 3G had is a big leap… and one that makes it relatively better, by far. I hesitate to opine beyond that because the audio quality would still be considered sub-par by many. Many consumers seem fine with listening to 64kbps streams from XM/Sirius and the like, so in the land of relativity, BT would seem just fine for many.
the other factor, which compares the language used in my last post on the topic to the language here, is that what product makers and audio technologist think on the matter is wholly different than what consumers actually care about. To many consumers, good enough is good enough.
To engineers and audio companies, they simply may or may not recognize this fact as reason alone to adopt a technology. Bluetooth wireless audio is well known in the industry to be the “marketable” and “convenience” play for wireless stereo audio, and not the “purist” or “performance” play, full stop. Among audio product makers, it is not considered an “audio” solution.
Hard to explain… but I hope this helps a little.
I have a question for you. I have been considering buying a used Iphone 3G. Having wireless headphones is something I definately want for music. You’ll have to excuse me, I don’t know that much about them. It sounds like the bluetooth headphones even for the 3GS are lacking quality. So how about using a bluetooth adapter out of the iphone port? Will the quality from an adapter be different on a 3G or 3GS? Or once you have an adapter in do you get the same quality?