Headphone sound quality drops when someone else is using their mic
While playing and someone is using their microphone to talk, my own headphones quality drops at the point that my game sounds like someone is talking through a tunnel, and I didn't even using my own mic, I'm just listening to their mic through some game channel or platform.
Another example is while I'm on some Teams meeting, my overall audio goes to shit even if I'm just listening...
I have read some older posts on Reddit that says that this happens because Bluetooth headphones with included mic cannot handle well both communications and they have to lower all the audio in order to keep the stability, but there's really no another way to fix this other than buying wired headphones or using an external mic? It sounds dumb to me, I just don't want to use my mic, why in the first place is my own PC/Headphone deciding when lower quality just because someone else is chatting through their mic?
Edit: I'm using Sennheiser Accentum Plus
It's when your headphones go into low latency mode
Most Bluetooth headphones add a lot, ALOT, of delay, like 200ms. It's such a big latency that video players delay the video to offset the audiodelay or the sounds don't line up on the video.
In low latency mode this delay is reduced but the audio sounds like shit.
So it doesn't matter if your mic is on or not, just that something is telling your headphones to go into low latency mode.
Fuck, thanks for the explanation though. This is definitely something I did not consider when purchasing these headphones.
Yeah, for gaming, it's better to just buy wired. Wireless really isn't worth it in my experience.
Anti Commercial-AI license
There are also some improvements ongoing on the quality, like aptX Low Latency mode and Fast Stream and generally Fast Stream is providing better quality, but still it will sound worse than aptX HD or any other high quality standard. https://support.avantree.com/hc/en-us/articles/31257100736793-Different-Bluetooth-Codecs-Latency
If it is real time audio it might not be possible to buffer audio