I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Bluetooth.
When it first came out in the nineties it looked like it would end the tangle of cables on my desktop, but the reality has fallen short.
Apple have embraced Bluetooth for keyboards and mice, but the PC world is dominated by proprietary 2.4GHz dongles for wireless communication which gobble up a USB port before eventually getting lost. Unfortunately adoption has been slow so Bluetooth is often at a premium price compared to similar devices.
Bluetooth devices are also far from “plug and play”. The pairing process is often hit and miss, and I defy you to set up a Bluetooth headset without reading the manual – “Hold down button B for five seconds until the light flashed red then enter the code 8888 (maybe…. if you’re asked for it)“.
On top of that, after nearly twenty years there is still no guarantee that the headset you use with your mobile phone will connect to any other device, say a laptop. It’s almost as though the vendors want to lock you into using their headsets exclusively with their phones… No, stop. That’s crazy talk.
That said, once it works it (mostly) works, but the audio quality has never been a high point. The Avantree Bluetooth Music Adapter attempts to fill some of the gaps in wireless connectivity, at least for streaming audio. It allows you to:
- Transmit audio to a Bluetooth device from an analog audio source (such as a CD player).
- Receive audio from a Bluetooth device and pass it to an analog destination (such as a stereo receiver).