Android Sunday Rant/Rage (Jul 05 2020) - Your weekly complaint thread!

Sunday Rant/Rage (Jul 05 2020) - Your weekly complaint thread!
Samsung Galaxy smartphone with nearly 7,000 mAh battery incoming
Other things manufacturers and reviewers fail to tell you – the state of Bluetooth audio in mobile phones is still shameful and even with the latest flagships you might not be able to reach by default good/very good quality in most conditions
LG's rollable smartphone to arrive early next year with a BOE screen
Sony Xperia 10 ii Review | Sony's smashing mid-range smartphone
The best Android power user features you may have forgotten about
5 best Android parental control apps and other methods!
Is this weird thing a PHONE or a CAMERA? - LTT Yongnuo YN450M phone-camera hybrid review

Sunday Rant/Rage (Jul 05 2020) - Your weekly complaint thread!

Posted: 05 Jul 2020 04:12 AM PDT

Note 1. Join our IRC, and Telegram chat-rooms! Please see our wiki for instructions.

This weekly Sunday thread is for you to let off some steam and speak out about whatever complaint you might have about:

Your device.
Your carrier.
Your device's manufacturer.
An app
Any other company

Rules

1) Please do not target any individuals or try to name/shame any individual. If you hate Google/Samsung/HTC etc. for one thing that is fine, but do not be rude to an individual app developer.

2) If you have a suggestion to solve another user's issue, please leave a comment but be sure it's constructive! We do not want any flame-wars.

3) Be respectful of other's opinions. Even if you feel that somebody is "wrong" you don't have to go out of your way to prove them wrong. Disagree politely, and move on.

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Samsung Galaxy smartphone with nearly 7,000 mAh battery incoming

Posted: 04 Jul 2020 07:42 PM PDT

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Other things manufacturers and reviewers fail to tell you – the state of Bluetooth audio in mobile phones is still shameful and even with the latest flagships you might not be able to reach by default good/very good quality in most conditions

Posted: 04 Jul 2020 10:12 AM PDT

Some time ago we talked how Bluetooth Low Energy 4.x/5.x is not equal in various flagships (Apple included) and also how with some of the most expensive flagships GPS/GNSS also might be a bigger compromise than you would expect.

The issue for this post is Bluetooth Audio and how things on this front are far from great especially in Android. Many people already know something is not right since they always run into issues with skipping sound and bad noise or bad sound in their headphones – but to learn why that takes place and how you can avoid/improve this you will need to read to the end of this AND DO YOUR OWN TESTS YOURSELF (also that type of problems might take place even when you are OK with less than good/excellent audio compression, so it might still be worth reading anyway).

The subject of what is wrong with Bluetooth in general and audio in special is so long that can't be covered fully in just a few paragraphs, but generally you might be having quality problems or transmission problems – if quality is not that much of an issue just skim over first part below and go to the transmission issues in the 2nd part.

Let's first define what I am calling here good quality headphone audio – you don't really need well-over-1000 buckaroos (name which I will use as a reference for USD in US and EUR in Europe) reference studio headphones to get good quality (you can get exceptional quality if money is no object but that is not the topic here), you can in fact get good quality starting slightly below 100 buckaroos with some good WIRED headphones. So you would expect that if you buy a wireless model that is 3-4 times more expensive you will be able to enjoy at all times about the same good audio quality – unfortunately you are definitely wrong about the "at all times" part and that might be in fact close to never by default (unless you really optimize your setup).

One quick observation – if you want to investigate audio quality the only ultra-reliable way is with special measuring device, but you can still get some decent results with your own ears (or somebody else's "golden ears") as long as you test properly (if your input sound is some 128 kbps MP3 or some internet streaming service you are doing it wrong, you need FLAC or other lossless sources to test properly). Your best results will come if you test comparatively almost side-by-side (or at least if you can change settings "on the fly" and you focus on how the sound changes). It is also important to know what types of the sound are most sensitive for instance to compression settings – in my experience classical music with a mix of string and brass instruments tends to show much easier differences in compression settings as a result of their much higher harmonics (if I would have to pick a single piece for testing I would pick Beethoven's 5th in the Gardiner version with a strong accent on the finale). Most of my very recent tests have been done on Sony MDR1000X and Sony WH1000XM3 which also have their own set of quirks – in fact the older MDR1000X which are "mark 1" have a cleaner sound than the newer "mark 3" and both sound MUCH better for absolute sound quality in a quiet room with noise cancelling disabled (and powered-on even on wired tests – impedance it around 47ohm like that vs around 16ohm when non-powered); however 1000XM3 are a huge lot better on noise cancelling so for travel are vastly superior.

I will direct people that are newer to the topic of Bluetooth codecs to an article like this - https://www.soundguys.com/understanding-bluetooth-codecs-15352/ - but to simplify things for the rest of this we will have to agree that you can't have good quality beyond a certain compression level and most people (myself included) would generally consider good to very good only (optimally) compressed streams above 500 kbps, with the streams in the 250-350 kbps being rather in the range of acceptable than good to very good. People might complain that 250-320 kbps is perfectly good for them (that could be mostly the Apple people where AAC only goes as far as 250-320 kbps) and of course (and as you can see in the link provided and many other on the internet) there will be people that will consider the 500 kbps not enough and some will fault even 900+ kbps - but for the moment let's go forward with this convention/compromise – since you might encounter problems even with that, or even with lower values and bigger compromises – and that has something to do with hardware and especially low-level driver limitations even in the most expensive flagships from the last few years. Again – properly testing that will not be easy. Also keep in mind that by default in no phone that I tested so far the highest quality is activated by default (something the article also mentioned) and in no phone that I tested so far you can make the highest-quality settings stick – so basically each time you connect your headphones you must go in developer options (which you must first enable in Android) and force the LDAC quality to the highest value. Go there and try changing quality while you listen to your favorite audio testing piece – on many phones you will instantly hear a difference (on some other phones you might need to stop the player and start again). DO YOUR OWN TESTS!

Do we have enough bandwidth for good audio? Bluetooth EDR has up to 3 Mbps but even under perfect conditions the limits for packet sending and receiving means that at the absolute most you can only reach around 2 Mbps, which would sound as perfectly acceptable. But the issue here is not the absolute bandwidth value but instead the EFFECTIVE BANDWIDTH available in specific conditions (that happen to be normal conditions for many/most people) – and here we must quickly talk about 2.4GHz radio coexistence, most notably WiFi + Bluetooth coexistence – and to get a quick start on that you can look at the main image from this page:

https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/200794267-Will-wireless-interference-and-Wi-Fi-impact-beacons-

where you will see that WiFi in 2.4GHz and Bluetooth are literally sharing the same radio bands where signals can't really work well at the absolute same time for both (things are in fact even worse than the image since many if not most of the modern 2.4GHz WiFi access points can also use double-width channels where a single AP will in fact take over almost twice of the spectrum shown in the picture above). If you add widespread situations in populated areas like THIS you can easily understand that radio quality can be quite a mess. You might also need to add to this mess the fact that for instance "true wireless" earbuds have tiny antennas and yet use about twice the radio bandwidth of normal headphones for the same quality (since you have one connection from your phone to one of the buds and then most often a separate connection from the first to the 2nd bud).

But this is not the entire mess or the worst part of it – the worst part of it comes since on the phone itself there is usually a hardware-level or low-level-driver level exclusion mechanism between WiFi in 2.4GHz and Bluetooth – so when both are active at the same time packets being sent over Bluetooth very frequently need to wait for WiFi activity to get to a well-defined state before being sent, and depending on how that is implemented the amount of waiting quickly becomes too long and you start losing packets and hearing "cracks" in the sound. The issue is obviously taking place less often (and somehow at a more apparently random times) on lower quality settings so if you want quickly to check that the issue is present you just need to connect some headphones on LDAC or aptxHD and crank-up quality to the maximum. You can accelerate that even more by running at the same time a bandwidth test on the 2.4GHz WiFi from the phone – I run https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest on a local wired server on my local network and I normally get around 80 Mbps on the 2.4GHz band on most phones, but when I listen from the same phone with highest LDAC quality the WiFi speedtest collapses to 10 Mbps and most often at the same time you get to hear some skipping or cracking! Funny is that on the most recents Pixel2XL drivers+Android the speed collapses to just about 2 Mbps but there is no cracking (it was absolutely there one year or so ago), which suggests they finally got the priority order right.

Either way in my experience the best way to minimize the issues with Bluetooth Audio skipping is to either disable completely WiFi or force a connection on a 5GHz Access Point - again DO YOUR OWN TESTS! There might still be one source of WiFi and Bluetooth interferences on Android while playing BT audio – and that is special WiFi and Bluetooth scanning as "location helper" - disable those as part of your tests and see if you get any difference. Also as a completely separate test (probably more important on "true wireless buds") - try to see if there is any difference keeping your phone on your left vs right pocket – you might sometimes be surprised of what you will find.

EDIT:

IMHO one other immediate improvement that Google could and should do with Android 11 is to use SBC standard codec in a better way as already the guys from LineageOS are doing:

https://lineageos.org/engineering/Bluetooth-SBC-XQ/

submitted by /u/catalinus
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LG's rollable smartphone to arrive early next year with a BOE screen

Posted: 04 Jul 2020 05:03 PM PDT