Hi Everyone
Well, I now have a Plantronics Pulsar 590E Bluetooth headset I was
planning to use with both my Mac Mini and my iBook. After about a day
of fiddling with it, I have it half working, but not working the way
I'd Like.
Given that OS X Leopard supported the A2DP bluetooth profile I didn't
anticipate any problems. What I got was a day of total frustration.
I'm able to pair the device without any issue, and set it to use a2dp
by choosing "headphones" during Bluetooth setup. I have no complaints
about the quality of the sound when it chooses to work--this is one of
the best sounding headsets I've seen in a while. The problem I'm
having, after a lot of troubleshooting, is that the device is dropped
after a few seconds of inactivity. As I understand it, this is a power-
saving measure, and I'd have no problem with it if the computer could
easily reconnect to the device. However, it does not. 75% of the time,
after the connection is dropped, it is not picked up again until I
manually reset it. Also, it is unpredictable when the connection will
drop--sometimes as much as a minute with no output, sometimes as
little as half a second. There is also serious latency issues while
using it through the OS X Bluetooth stack.
I did manage to get it to work by using an audio reflector driver with
a program called a2dpcast, which simply reflects the primary audio
stream to the bluetooth headset via a2dp. This works quite well and
has very low latency, however I cannot use this and use the bt headset
for voice chats on Skype at the same time. Yes, I know that with the
OS X bluetooth stack to use it with Skype I'd have to switch profiles
and that it would temporarily degrade the quality of VO.
I have these same issues with both my iBook and my Mac Mini. I know
someone on this list was using this headset successfully. Have you
found a way around these issues? I suspect that all BT headsets would
be subject to similar problems, and googling the issue doesn't help
much. I find a lot of forum pages with people having this problem...
and a lot of pages of people saying that they have no problem. I'll
get a USB Bluetooth dongle if that's what is needed, one with built-in
firmware support for a2dp if that would help though I'm not sure it
would do any good.
Any help with this would be much appreciated.
