electric relaxation

I finally had a good enough reason to try pairing my Nokia BH-905 bluetooth headset with my Mac – I’m working late tonight, my mom is visiting and is currently asleep in my room and I don’t want to disturb her with music.

I managed to pair the headset but it sounded like crap. Turns out you need to jack up the minimum bitpool setting for audio devices in OS X because the default negotiated with many headsets is wrong or bogus or something:

I tried using the Bluetooth Explorer as detailed here, but I couldn’t get the settings to persist – if I closed and reopened the Special Options window, the settings were back to 0.

With more Googling I found out how to set it using the defaults command in a Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent “Apple Bitpool Min (editable)” 50

Both ’40′ and ’50′ work much better than nothing. It seems like ’40′ actually sounds better than ’50′. Not sure why that would be though maybe forcing the minimum value too high causes the audio codec to forcibly clip in order to conserve buffer space on the device or something? Yes I’m waving my hands wildly…