Headphones and Bluetooth Quality

BACKTOBACK

Recently purchased a pair of Sony WH-1000XM4 bluetooth headphones and mostly use them for music from my very old Samsung s8 phone. I also purchased a Bluetooth adaptor for my television. The quality of sound for some reason seems better from the television than from my phone.
If i was to upgrade my phone to a newer Samsung model would it make any difference to the quality of sound transmitted over Bluetooth or would it be the same?

[Deleted User]

I've got exactly the same headphones, they are great quality but they will connect with different codecs depending on the device they connect to which can make a difference.

First of all, I'd say the source of the sound you are listening to could be the underlying cause of - what are you using them with and do you know the bitrate / quality of the source sounds / music on the phone vs the TV?

Also what is the quality issue in sound terms? Distorted, cutting out, compressed etc?

What the model of the device you are using with your TV?

Are you connecting them to your phone as a "headset" ie can use the microphone as well as the headphones? The headset mode uses a much lower quality connection as it has the two-way comms for the microphone.

The next thing is the codec used to connect via Bluetooth to transmit the sound. The M4's can use the following in order of quality - best to worst:

1. LDAC - proprietary Sony codec but available on Android devices after version 8.0 - what version are you on?
2. AAC - better than SBC and available on Android / Apple devices.
3. SBC - oldest codec, most compatible but not the best quality.

You can see what codec the headphones are using in the app - screen shot from my app when using Nvdia Shield Pro (Android):




Next along I'd ask what other Bluetooth devices are connected to the phone - if other devices like a watch are using the bandwidth it could affect the available quality?

Next deep dive will be setting around bitrate / sample rate / bit depth.

BACKTOBACK

Thank you for your detailed response, greatly appreciated. I am getting the LDAC displayed. I was mainly streaming music from a Deezer account. The music was not distorted or cutting out. Just not the quality i felt it could be.
I have just tried downloading better quality mp3 files onto a sd card in the phone and the music is much better.
Maybe streaming from Deezer is the problem?

[Deleted User]

BACKTOBACK said:

Thank you for your detailed response, greatly appreciated. I am getting the LDAC displayed. I was mainly streaming music from a Deezer account. The music was not distorted or cutting out. Just not the quality i felt it could be.
I have just tried downloading better quality mp3 files onto a sd card in the phone and the music is much better.
Maybe streaming from Deezer is the problem?

Yes, Deezer could be the issue - the quality varies from a pretty poor 64-128kb/s for the free accounts up to a decent 320kb/s for a paid subscription.

Check the settings in the app, it will offer 4 settings, the high quality is only available for subscribed users, the high fidelity option cost even more but will offer CD quality but I think it is only available on the desktop app:



320 kbit/s should be high enough quality for most purposes and should sound great on the Sony's.

BACKTOBACK

Thanks again, it is a paid subscription done through BMW (was given 3 years with my car) and it was a setting in the app that was set to standard quality. I have changed this to high quality which is much better