Well today I received through the post my new Bluetooth audio adapter the IDC i4.
It has the apt-X codec which is currently the best Bluetooth codec for audio the older devices support sbc which I think is roughly the quality of a 128kbs mp3. The device has the older 30 pin iphone4 connector which it uses for charging. A 3.5mm stereo aux output 3 buttons vol skip + – and a multifunction button which can do several things including voice commands it can work as a hands free kit.
Problems
Well connecting it wasn’t an issue but the range sure was the signal from my mac to the dongle was really low and it was breaking connection at 3 feet. Well that was the fault of my MacBook so i used a usb bluetooth 4 device on the mac.
To force your system to use an external Bluetooth controller instead of the internal one, open Terminal and type:
sudo nvram bluetoothHostControllerSwitchBehavior=always
then reboot. To revert to the default OS X behavior, type:
sudo nvram -d bluetoothHostControllerSwitchBehavior
You may need to turn off (or un-pair) Bluetooth accessories that are currently using your internal Bluetooth controller, as they can prevent the dongle from being detected by the Continuity Activation Tool.
Basically turn off bluetooth wait 3 seconds plug in Bluetooth USB and hopefully this time the external bluetooth adapter will be used. The diffence in signal strength is massive. where I had 70Db with the internal now it was an excellent 50Db *(less than 60Db is ideal).
Sounds good, without the external bluetooth it made as much sense to jack directly into my Mac. Technically audio wise that may be the higher quality option, bluetooth is quite limited by bandwidth and although some adapters can work with mp3 most will end up unpacking on the computer packing with the codec and unpacking at the other end. Sharing spectrum with your wifi isn’t good if you don’t have a 5Ghz option then go for a high channel like 13 and perhaps limit the bandwidth to 20 Mhz instead of 40Mhz. I also dropped power on the wifi but i may put some things back to how they were now the usb dongle is working well.
