Bluetooth vs other wireless headsets
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What is the difference between Bluetooth headsets and wireless headsets using a USB receiver? Is there any noteworthy performance differences or such? I fail to see why you'd need the proprietary receiver otherwise.
>>20528
Bluetooth headsets look like a Bluetooth headset; USB headsets look like a USB soundcard.
Compatibility is a lot more straightforward with a USB soundcard, because there's exactly one type of USB soundcard, and it's supported in the OS. You don't need a functioning Bluetooth stack, you don't need to transcode anything in the driver, you don't have to handle pairing or power management. From the OS's perspective, it's a black box that it just has to feed audio into.
Also Bluetooth didn't get a high-quality, synchronised audio profile until very late on in the standard, and older adapters and software stacks don't support it. Whether your phone will support it or not depends on the phases of the moon. Windows's Bluetooth support has been until very recently a massive quagmire, because Microsoft was terrified of another Netscape lawsuit if they bundled their own, working stack into the OS.
Given all the odds against Bluetooth headphones actually working, I can hardly blame them for saying "fuck Bluetooth", implementing a standard, supported USB interface, and hiding all the complexity behind it.
