Poor quality mono on bluetooth headphones

On iOS standalone, desktop standalone and VST3 in Reaper I’m getting mono terrible audio quality when using WF1000-XM3 Sony bluetooth headphones.

I saw some threads relating to bluetooth headphones but they were all related to iOS. Is there anything I can do to remedy this?

You might want to check if your device(s) are trying to use the microphone over Bluetooth, most devices (even/especially nice ones) will do this when you attempt to use BT in duplex.

well bluetooth isnt all too great as quality is sacrificed for wireless but make sure youre using the right setting for the headphones.

Check on the device settings in your connected devices. There’ll be like “Stereo”, “Hands Free” etc. flick thru the different ones and see if you find a good fit.

Also you should note mono = left+right. so if you’re processing incorrectly you could be causing phase cancellation resulting in poor sounds quality.

Headphones go into phone call mode as soon as an input channel is opened, which means terribly compressed 16kHz mono (or 8kHz if you’re really unlucky and either the headphone or the computer/dongle is very old). Make sure the apps you use only open the playback device in the device settings and you should be fine.