Why do most of the wireless headphones use Bluetooth connectivity ?

[james_bond]

8-9 years ago I had purchased a Sennheiser wireless headphone & it used FM for connectivity.

Before that I used to own a wireless headphone which used RF.

These days when I search "wireless headphones" on Amazon 95% of them use only Bluetooth.

 

Why do you think this change happened ?

[Senzelian]

Low power consumption, cheap to implement, every smartphone supports it...

 

Edit:
Keep in mind that basically all (couldn't think of one that doesn't) mobile devices use a single chip for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

[AbydosOne]

2 minutes ago, james_bond said:

Why do you think this change happened ?

Ubiquitous Bluetooth in cell phones (and to a lesser extent, laptops and consoles). It's also a fairly universal standard, instead of being locked to a certain brand's transmitter.

[mariushm]

Newer bluetooth versions are probably much more energy efficient and can also give more quality (depending on codec). FM I would guess is susceptible to noise and other issues and probably more power hungry to both transmit and decode.. 

[TetraSky]

My only issue with bluetooth, is that if you buy a bluetooth dongle online, unless you pay the premium for a brand name, you're likely going to get scammed. I bought 3 bluetooth dongle for my PC in the last year. They all claimed to be BT 5.0. 

All of them reported as either BT 4.0 or BT 4.1 in Windows.

 

 

But yeah, like the others have said, because of how ubiquitous it is. Bluetooth connectivity is in pretty much everything these days. My brother's toaster and micro wave also have bluetooth in them. I'm not even joking.

[sub68]

Bluetooth is standard also its just every where.

But as a audio engineer it sucks

[Zodiark1593]

25 minutes ago, james_bond said:

8-9 years ago I had purchased a Sennheiser wireless headphone & it used FM for connectivity.

Before that I used to own a wireless headphone which used RF.

These days when I search "wireless headphones" on Amazon 95% of them use only Bluetooth.

 

Why do you think this change happened ?

Everyone and their dog (probably almost literally) supports Bluetooth, and recent revision have made Bluetooth good enough for the job. Lossless audio can even be transmitted, though both devices must support said lossless format. 

[james_bond]

@everyone who replied.

 

The only thing about Bluetooth that makes me nervous is the debate about the fact if Bluetooth radiation causes cancer.

 

If you Google if WiFi causes cancer you get a clear answer & that answer in NO but in case of Bluetooth people are not sure yet & that's the problem.

[sub68]

27 minutes ago, james_bond said:

Bluetooth radiation causes cancer.

short answer no

(its on a UHF radio spectrum)

there has been no solid evidence and these are pretty low power transmission compared to FM and AM

[AbydosOne]

41 minutes ago, james_bond said:

The only thing about Bluetooth that makes me nervous is the debate about the fact if Bluetooth radiation causes cancer.

Pretty much everything causes cancer. Or at least in does in California.

 

Bluetooth uses the same band (at lower power) as 2.4 GHz wifi; no appreciable risk of cancer.

[LAwLz]

58 minutes ago, james_bond said:

@everyone who replied.

 

The only thing about Bluetooth that makes me nervous is the debate about the fact if Bluetooth radiation causes cancer.

 

If you Google if WiFi causes cancer you get a clear answer & that answer in NO but in case of Bluetooth people are not sure yet & that's the problem.

Bluetooth uses the same spectrum as WiFi, but at lower power. It is literally the same signal (physically, how the chips interpret the signal is different). That's why it is possible to have Bluetooth/WiFi combo chips and antennas. 

If WiFi isn't causing cancer (which is the scientific consensus) then Bluetooth isn't causing it either. 

 

Your old headphones that used some proprietary RF signal probably operated in the same spectrum as Bluetooth and WiFi as well, so it is just as (un)likely to cause cancer as Bluetooth and WiFi.

The reason why I believe your old headphones also used the same frequency as Bluetooth is because 2.4GHz (what WiFi and Bluetooth uses) is in the so called "unlicensed spectrum". Here is a list of stuff on Wikipedia that uses the 2.4GHz radio spectrum and here is a good article that explains why so much stuff uses that particular wavelength. 

[Alan G]

1 hour ago, james_bond said:

@everyone who replied.

 

The only thing about Bluetooth that makes me nervous is the debate about the fact if Bluetooth radiation causes cancer.

 

If you Google if WiFi causes cancer you get a clear answer & that answer in NO but in case of Bluetooth people are not sure yet & that's the problem.

All of the cancer scares about Bluetooth and cell phones in general are just BS!  This started happening when cell phones came out and there were worries about constant usage and brain cancer.  In the US, there are very good statistics on the number of brain cancers per year.  There has been a downward trend in occurrence with a huge increase (exponential) in cell phone use.  One might argue that cell phones protect you against getting brain cancer!

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, james_bond said:

8-9 years ago I had purchased a Sennheiser wireless headphone & it used FM for connectivity.

Before that I used to own a wireless headphone which used RF.

These days when I search "wireless headphones" on Amazon 95% of them use only Bluetooth.

 

Why do you think this change happened ?

Bluetooth is awful, and the primary reason for this is eWaste. If you have headphones that have proprietary radios, they won't play nice with other equipment ("this device will accept all interference, and may have degraded performance" type disclaimers) where as bluetooth devices will play nice with each other on the 2.4ghz band but WiFi won't. So if you're surrounded by 2.4Ghz radios (Eg wireless keyboards and mice) already, bluetooth will probably have limited range, and WiFi will probably not operate at it's peak performance. 

 

Most of the rubbish tier equipment out there doesn't want to pay for bluetooth licencing, so they may still use a proprietary wireless solution, but the reality is that unless the headset has a external charging requirement that is also the wireless base station, which gives it an excuse to use it's own radios, it almost certainly costs more to produce those proprietary radios than it does to get off-the-shelf bluetooth parts from a third party.

 

So what's most likely happened is that the cost for bluetooth radio parts has gone down (and really should cost half as much, as the headphones only need one half of the radio pair, where as proprietary solutions require two radios.) Which re-affirms the point that the "95% only use bluetooth" is probably because of cost. So a super high end headset/headphones may prefer it's proprietary radios to get more audio bandwidth, or a super-low end headset may be using proprietary radios based on older tech.

 

Like to give you a base point here. The wireless headsets that are used in offices and call centers, are not bluetooth, they are DECT. The base station/charger's give you a fair amount of distance, can be conferenced with each other, and even support bluetooth devices like mobile phones, conventional telephone handset connections, and PC (skype/teams.) But the quality of these headsets are debatable, as DECT is a standard you may recognize as TDMA, but on the 1.9Ghz band (which sits next to the DPCS band for cell phones, and as such North American DECT can not be used outside North America, and European DECT devices can not be used here.) They do not support high quality audio profiles.

 

But I digress, I think most people should not be using wireless headsets as putting wireless stuff near your head dangerous in the first place.

[AbydosOne]

29 minutes ago, Alan G said:

One might argue that cell phones protect you against getting brain cancer!

 

https://xkcd.com/925/