CHAPTER FOUR - BINAURAL SOUND IN THEATRE

There is a little known issue with Bluetooth headphones/headsets. If you are using a set of wireless/Bluetooth headphones, and you select to also use that as the microphone in your teleconferencing software (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype, etc) then all audio in your headphones will change from stereo to mono, and is reduced to a really low quality 8kHz sample rate. This is because the Bluetooth data bandwidth is quite low, so if you’re not using the mic built in to your headphones, all that data can be used to provide high quality stereo audio; but if you use the mic, half that data is used for the microphone, and only half the data is then available for the headphone audio. This is a feature of Bluetooth itself, so this applies to Mac’s and PC;s, desktops and tablets, cheap Bluetooth headphones and the most expensive Apple headsets.

You can test this:

• connect some bluetooth headphones to your computer.

• close all applications.

• listen to this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnzIIhLNHqg

• it should sound super high quality, very stereo and lovely.

• Now, open up Zoom or Meet or Teams, and start a new meeting, with the Mic input set to your bluetooth headphones

• You should instantly hear the audio in your headphones flatten into mono, and reduce in audio quality to about 10% of what it was.

You can get round this by using wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones that don’t have a built-in mic (quite rare these days) or by using your Bluetooth headphones and selecting to use the build-in computer microphone rather than the headphones’s microphone.

And yes, it does apply to AirPods too.