Too many peripherals connected via BT at the same time?

[ricardodacp]

Hey guys,

 

I have a laptop with built in bluetooth, but it works very poorly with my peripherals, audio gets out of sync really badly and stutters a lot, many times when turning on the laptop, they can't connect and I have to pair them again, etc.

So I bought a USB dongle adapter (Asus USB-BT400) to replace the built in BT and it works a lot better, but when I connect my earbuds and my keyboard at the same time, all I can hear from them is a constant stutter, but if I only connect the earbuds, the audio works well. This doesn't happen with the headphones + keyboard so I was wondering if this could be a BT bandwidth limitation, since the earbuds have BT 5.0, the headphones 4.0 and the keyboard 4.0 as well.

 

Also, this Asus dongle sometimes still gives me some issues with peripherals not connection and severe out of sync audio, do I have a better / powerful alternative?

Thanks!

[Hugh54321]

how many bluetooth devices do you have around you? I worked in an office where we had to throw away our wireless mice and keyboards coz so many devices caused too much interferrence. 

[ricardodacp]

2 minutes ago, Hugh54321 said:

how many bluetooth devices do you have around you? I worked in an office where we had to throw away our wireless mice and keyboards coz so many devices caused too much interferrence. 

Only mine, the keyboard and eadphones. Mouse works with it's own dongle.

[Caennanu]

if i remember correctly, bluetooth works in the same frequency range as the 5ghz band from wifi. So if you are using 5ghz wifi bands, it could cause interference.

If your mouse has its own dongle, but also works on bluetooth, it means it will interfere with other bluetooth appliances if using the same frequencies.

Same goes for your cellphone(s), if they have bluetooth on and are broadcasting, regardless if they have something connected or not, they will cause interference.

 

You can compare it to an highway. If you're in traffic it doesn't matter how many red or blue cars there are, it matters how many cars there are if you are stuck in traffic or if that its flowing.

[Hugh54321]

1 minute ago, ricardodacp said:

Only mine, the keyboard and eadphones. Mouse works with it's own dongle.

I'm no expert but I can imagine earphones would saturate the environment. I also use bluetooth for audio coz the quality is better than shitty jacks and cables and its nice to not have a cable attached to my head. I gave up on wireless mouse and keyboard a long time ago. You do have an alternative. This is to upgrade the wifi/bluetooth PCIe card in your laptop. I'm currently using intel 3168NGW and bluetooth is ok for audio on linux. Last week I ordered intel 9260 off amazon, should arrive in a week or two. I'm just upgrading for the wifi. Upgrading was cheap. It was around $13 USD for a card.I wont know if its any good until i recieve it. These cards are a bitch to research.

[porina]

Bluetooth was and still is a mess of various parts.

 

Latency on sound could be due to A2DP codecs, especially if not using one that is specifically low latency.

 

If you have more than one device connected to the same Bluetooth master, then it is up to how good that implementation is how it behaves. A keyboard shouldn't be enough to disrupt one audio endpoint. I don't know if it is possible, could you use both Bluetooth endpoints, one each for each device?

 

Running out of bandwidth is very unlikely in a single user situation. Bluetooth operates in the same 2.4 GHz bands as wi-fi, so in busy areas that could cause problems.

 

Beyond that, there's the usual trick of ensuring all drivers and firmware are up to date.

[ricardodacp]

49 minutes ago, Hugh54321 said:

I'm no expert but I can imagine earphones would saturate the environment. I also use bluetooth for audio coz the quality is better than shitty jacks and cables and its nice to not have a cable attached to my head. I gave up on wireless mouse and keyboard a long time ago. You do have an alternative. This is to upgrade the wifi/bluetooth PCIe card in your laptop. I'm currently using intel 3168NGW and bluetooth is ok for audio on linux. Last week I ordered intel 9260 off amazon, should arrive in a week or two. I'm just upgrading for the wifi. Upgrading was cheap. It was around $13 USD for a card.I wont know if its any good until i recieve it. These cards are a bitch to research.

I actually never considered changing the PCIe card exactly because I have no idea about compatibility and/or if would make a difference for my use case, but I might give it a try.

[Hugh54321]

2 minutes ago, ricardodacp said:

I actually never considered changing the PCIe card exactly because I have no idea about compatibility and/or if would make a difference for my use case, but I might give it a try.

the first step is to find out what you currently have

[ricardodacp]

1 hour ago, Caennanu said:

if i remember correctly, bluetooth works in the same frequency range as the 5ghz band from wifi. So if you are using 5ghz wifi bands, it could cause interference.

If your mouse has its own dongle, but also works on bluetooth, it means it will interfere with other bluetooth appliances if using the same frequencies.

Same goes for your cellphone(s), if they have bluetooth on and are broadcasting, regardless if they have something connected or not, they will cause interference.

 

You can compare it to an highway. If you're in traffic it doesn't matter how many red or blue cars there are, it matters how many cars there are if you are stuck in traffic or if that its flowing.

I'm connected to 2.4ghz but there's also 5ghz going on and a fair amount of broadcast noise in the air, but either way, I feel like it's not asking too much for a keyboard and earbuds to work at the same time... I don't know.

[Hugh54321]

Just now, ricardodacp said:

I'm connected to 2.4ghz but there's also 5ghz going on and a fair amount of broadcast noise in the air, but either way, I feel like it's not asking too much for a keyboard and earbuds to work at the same time... I don't know.

IMO asking for wireless keyboard/mouse to work at all is too much. They are that bad.

[nox_]

13 minutes ago, Hugh54321 said:

IMO asking for wireless keyboard/mouse to work at all is too much. They are that bad.

No, they aren't that bad, never had problems with my wireless mice, also use wirelesses iem's at the same time,never had problems, and I live in very congested area, wifi signals all over. Maybe the keyboard is very shity and it causes problems?

[ricardodacp]

1 minute ago, Hugh54321 said:

IMO asking for wireless keyboard/mouse to work at all is too much. They are that bad.

I'm saying this because when connecting audio peripherals with my OP3T, they work pretty much flawlessly either for connecting or latency and that doesn't happen with the laptop even if it's the only thing connected via BT, there's often a "can't pair device" error or turning the switch connection on for the device, it connecting and disconnecting a few seconds later. It just feels so solid on the phone that I'd guess it could handle another device connected with ease, not like the laptop that feels like it's always struggling. Having dual boot only makes it worse because I have to obligatorily pair them again.

[ricardodacp]

4 minutes ago, noxdeouroboros said:

No, they aren't that bad, never had problems with my wireless mice, also use wirelesses iem's at the same time,never had problems, and I live in very congested area, wifi signals all over. Maybe the keyboard is very shity and it causes problems?

It's not top of the line, the Anne Pro 2, but compared to the audio peripherals (and mouse, I also tried to pair my MX Master 2S and it's not a good experience, but since It has it's own dongle, I don't care) it's the one that gives me less problems with the connection.

[ricardodacp]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Bluetooth was and still is a mess of various parts.

 

Latency on sound could be due to A2DP codecs, especially if not using one that is specifically low latency.

 

If you have more than one device connected to the same Bluetooth master, then it is up to how good that implementation is how it behaves. A keyboard shouldn't be enough to disrupt one audio endpoint. I don't know if it is possible, could you use both Bluetooth endpoints, one each for each device?

 

Running out of bandwidth is very unlikely in a single user situation. Bluetooth operates in the same 2.4 GHz bands as wi-fi, so in busy areas that could cause problems.

 

Beyond that, there's the usual trick of ensuring all drivers and firmware are up to date.

I don't think I can use both and It also seems weird to run out of bandwidth, but maybe I just have really bad hardware on my laptop.