I think I made a bad impulse purchase. Help.

January 17, 2009 3:05 PM

Can I make my new Bluetooth headset not suck?

I think I'm pretty much screwed, but I figured I would ask. Today, on a lark, I bought a pair of Motorola S9-HD Stereo Bluetooth headphones. I'm using these with a MacBook Pro, dual-booting Vista and OS X.

In both OS environments, when the headphones are paired, I get two services - one called "stereo headphones" and another called "headset".. This seems to be an either/or proposition - I can either connect them as headphones, or connect them as a headset.

When I connect them as headphones, I get great stereo sound quality.

When I connect them as a headset, the sound quality goes from stereo to mono. I realize this is by design.

The problem is, I'd like to use them with Ventrilo when I play World of Warcraft and for stuff like audio chat when I'm killing zombies in Left 4 Dead.. but I don't want to hear the games in mono - I want to hear them in glorious stereo!

Is there a way to.. I don't know... enable both Bluetooth services at the same time? Or, in other words, use the mic functionality of the headset while preserving stereo output?

posted by kbanas to Technology (1 answer total)

I think you may be out of luck. If the sound quality has to go from stereo to mono when you use the mic, it might be because there isn't enough bandwidth across the bluetooth connection to carry more than two audio streams at once. If that makes sense.
posted by lucidium at 5:42 AM on January 18, 2009