Well, I am going to get a bluetooth cell phone shortly and so I got a headset and dongle to use on my laptop, where I also make VoIP calls.

I was shocked, flabbergasted to find that the bluetooth headset profile only transmits audio at telephone quality 8khz sampling rate. So even plugged into my laptop for hifi (didn't think I
would ever need to use that term again) recording, it sounds like a telephone, and likewise for
playback.

Why? Why? Why?

This makes all the typical bluetooth headsets a terrible choice for Skype or other hifi voip, no good as voice recorders, terrible for listening to ordinary quality audio and effectively useless for anything but toll-quality phone calls.

It would have been so simple to have allowed the headset profile to support higher quality, or to simply have it always do high quality and let the cell phones do the trivial downsampling. I realize that an earpiece is not going to provide headphone quality but there's no reason it should always sound like crap.

Bluetooth includes a "headphone" profile that does CD quality digital audio, and that profile can in theory have microphone to make a hifi headset, but that's not what everybody is buying these days, so no point in making sofware products (such as VoIP tools) that use a bluetooth headset and want higher quality.

Perhaps a few years down the road it will be common to have headphone profile headsets but we are now a long way away from this.

What a stupid mistake. Sorry, but I just have to rant.