lloeki 6 days ago

> feedback, or whatever that's called

Monitoring.

There are umpteenth ways to do that, and I find headsets themselves do it the most poorly of all (if they have the feature at all).

> The MBP mic is generally preferable to most headset boom mics

Another benefit is not paying the '90s GSM handsfree BT profile codec pain (at the cost of A2DP having slightly higher latency)

1
arghwhat 6 days ago

> Monitoring

It's called sidetone. Headsets do it so your ears don't feel clogged and to avoid subconscious yelling.

Some headsets let you adjust it either through a regular Sidetone volume control or some dedicated app. Soundcards also often have this feature in the form of a Mic output volume control, done in hardware to reduce latency.

A significant difference in headset quality is in sidetone latency. The heavier the DSP processing required to get a reasonable mic output, the harder it is to hit latency targets. Headset SoCs have dedicated hardware for this - a user-space solution like Apple pulls on their laptops would not be able to meet a usable latency target.

> Another benefit is not paying the '90s GSM handsfree BT profile codec pain

LE Audio includes the LC3 codec, solving this once and for all.

In the meantime while this rolls out, various alternate codecs exist that are fairly widely supported. This is especially true when using fancier headsets with a dedicated bluetooth dongle as they have more flexibility when it comes to codecs and compatibility.