This is not an isolated case, users have been complaining about it. For instance on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jabra/comments/qjwxdu/muting_during_slackzoom_calls_on_mac_elite_85t/
On this post, official Jabra Support declares: "We do not support the use of the Jabra Elite 85t on computers" I also reached out to their support per email, and after a few back and forth and reaching their Lead, the answer is the same. They won't provide a refund nor solutions.
This limitation isn't advertised on the official Amazon offer nor on their official website. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Jabra-Wireless-Bluetooth-Earbuds-Titanium/dp/B08HR78C46/ Official website: https://www.jabra.com/bluetooth-headsets/jabra-elite-85t
In the absence of advertised limitation, shouldn't the mic work (without dropping) with every device supporting the adequate BT profiles? How is a user supposed to know they don't support computers?
My last email to Jabra was ignored:
The message that computers are not supported devices on the Jabra Elite 85h was a very upsetting response to receive, so I didn't respond for quite a while. It's quite frustrating to hear that expensive bluetooth headphones designed to connect to 8 devices are not meant to work with computers. If that were the case, I would expect the Jabra site to say that computers are not supported in BIG letters, as I imagine a lot of people, like me, would expect their computer to be one of those 8 devices.
However, this statement about computers not being supported cannot be true. On the Jabra site for this product, it says: "no need to plug your headphones into your computer." It also has a picture of the product beside a Macbook. I've included screen shots of the product page that show these two points that clearly indicate computers are supported. I've heard this issue of the Elite 85h not being compatible with computers before from Jabra support, but it seems so implausible that Jabra would make bluetooth headphones that don't support computers, and equally implausible that they would mislead people into buying them on their site by suggesting that computers are supported if they are not.
I'm still hoping to get solutions to all the problems I'm having connecting my Jabra Elite 85h to my MacBook Air. Currently it's unusable and I'm going to have to buy another headset to replace them, which is much more wasteful than I would like.
Yeah, like... this is exactly how you get yourself sued, so if that's what they're hoping for...?
The Jabra Link 370 usb dongle. The headphones will then pair with the Jabra software on PC.
That said, I haven't had issues pairing the 85h with a MacBook Pro without the dongle.
And finally, it's ridiculous that Jabra doesn't support this or any other solution.
Unfortunately, that's $94 CAD on Amazon, and more money to Jabra to get these headsets to work as advertised. I'm going to save my pennies and get the new Sony WH-1000XM5.
I chatted with five different Bose Support staff and they all refused to file a bug report. They are happy to send me a third pair with the same problem.
How can we get companies to respect their users?
Stop buying their broken products.
In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.
Stop giving them money unless they provide source and schematics and unlockable bootloaders and put things together with screws rather than glue.
As long as you the public at large keeps taking abuse and keep handing over more cash, they'll keep doing it.
Call them up and tell them that you're performing a hardware compatibility evaluation to the same standard of due-diligence that would be used ahead-of-time in any competent enterprise-scale hardware accessory rollout - and that a prerequisite step in this process is to validate candidate accessories on Android in unusual environments, to exhaustively verify interoperability considering the known variability of the Bluetooth landscape (on both sides of any given connection).
"But that's a computer."
"Yes, running Android, an OS explicitly supported by logos on your packaging, specific instructions in the user manual and support in the official app."
"Using this hardware on a computer is not supported."
"Your official product communications clearly convey that you unilaterally support Android regardless of device type. The type of Android device I am using here is an x86 laptop, precisely to facilitate wide-range compatibility testing, and to catch potential compatibility issues early on. I'm interested in using this hardware, but after only 20 minutes of testing I've found I experience dropouts while using the officially supported app and running on an officially supported operating system."
I would be very interested to know how the conversation would continue...
Sadly this would be one of those Weird Thing In Instruction Manual-generating events ("why does this say it's not compatible with Android on PC???") but it might work.
(And if the person on the other end of the phone is mostly listening for keywords and they actually think you might be doing some sort of enterprise rollout (*cough* and want to buy a lot more hardware *cough*)... they might suddenly be very interested...)
I admittedly don't care about any of it either. My goal would be to introduce chinks in the armor in the arguments presented and try and carry that as far as possible in the hope a solution presents itself. The idea in the GP popped into my head as one entirely-throwaway potential solution to that bigger-picture problem. It's quite possible a different approach may work better.
They do sell a dongle to make this work, and more generally I have heard you can use things like the Creative BT-W2/W3 to make Bluetooth devices that don't play well with whatever chipset/driver mess you have play well - because they just show up to the OS as a generic soundcard and don't mention the word Bluetooth to anything the OS can see, and their implementation, unlike many software/hardware vendors', _works_ robustly. But I have not personally tried it, yet.
(I'm still using the 85h for some things because the set of {USB-C charging, good noise cancelling, does not break with strange bugs in a week} headphones is much smaller than you might hope, but not for more general use.)
The remedy is to unplug the device from USB and then connect your headset device elsewhere.
A great feature is the light which will tell you what codec you’re connected with. An even greater feature is to press the button on the dongle and switch the codec. AptX-LL (low latency) is really nice for video games or videos generally. AptX-HD is acceptable for music if you’re not wed to lossless.
I keep having to reset it and fiddle with it every reboot.
If it's any consolation... I recently came across an ASUS all-in-one PC where it was not enough to install the Realtek Windows HDA driver, no... that would have been too easy. You also needed to install a tiny extra driver that wasn't visible by default on their driver list in the Audio driver section. The entire audio world is utter, utter madness.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/sound/hd-audio/notes....
The problem I personally have (if there are any pulseaudio experts out there) is it continually re-enabling ephemeral audio sources like HDMI and bluetooth when they are plugged back in, even if I'd set them to "off" before unplugging them - fortunately since I set the analog to default it usually doesn't mess anything up, but it's a bit untidy, and also annoying for the one USB webcam that has a mic plugged in, where I get a surprise input if I don't watch it.
It'd be great to have it persist settings for identically named sources even after they are removed.
The shitty mux connected to the jack on the other end is the problem there.
There is at least one relevant "outside" factor. While the connector is standardized, the housing end of the plug does not seem to be. As soon as a phone is in a case, the case's hole for the 3.5mm connector is too small to accept the housing of a normal 3.5mm plug. That's true even for the shell the active3 tab comes with, not only some cheap after-market. It still works with the connector not fully in, but not reliably.
Maybe my 3.5mm connectors are all too old and I should try to find a replacement with a more narrow housing. Or a 3.5mm male/female "adapter" with a narrow housing.
I chose them because they were the smallest and most discreet ones and I'm glad for once to have Apple's quality.
An alternative to starting it with the experiment flag is to use the "Disable Automatic Gain Control" Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-...
I've been using it for a while with an 85h and it at least removes _that_ part of the failure. The stupid things keep rebooting themselves randomly while I'm on calls, however - I will never buy another Jabra product again.
(there was a discussion about this a while ago on reddit where folks identified these workarounds): https://www.reddit.com/r/Jabra/comments/qikzif/elite_85h_spo...
I have the Elite 85t and it works fine with my Android phone and both my Dell Win 10 machines, so it may be a Mac issue. No excuse for their shitty behavior, but I'd research Mac-specific BT fixes.
Or it could be an issue with the button functionality. Try disabling button actions for calls in Sound+.
EDIT: the idea of tunneling USB-C ports over Bluetooth (like the wireless USB standard that I never quite saw take off) just occurred to me while writing this comment. What fresh hell.
Ah well, I thought I was enjoying my third Jabra product and it turns out I won't touch them with a barge pole again, unless and until they publicly retract and apologise for this behaviour.
Anyone have recommendations for a good on-ear headset for (mostly) work calls?
I use my QC35s all the time but switch to a jabra wired headset for calls as got lots of complaints with the QC35s and kept being told to go on mute.
After updating Macos to Monterey
On the other hand, if I were you, I would suspect that first and go after Apple before blaming Jabra. (Maybe the latter knows that Apple broke something in its BT implementation, and this is their excuse?)
Perhaps someone with this same environment and knowledge of (or is willing to learn) the BT specs/details can try debugging the problem and determine the ultimate cause and possibly come up with a fix. I'd love to read such an article and I suspect many others on HN would too.
(I use BT devices very rarely --- and so far all the ones I did use, seemed to work OK; even the generic Chinese ones with the infamous voice prompts.)
> On the other hand, if I were you, I would suspect that first and go after Apple before blaming Jabra.
This also seems odd to me. I'm still on Big Sur, my Jabra Elite 65t (different model than OP) are working perfectly fine.
Just like USB-C is USB-C I guess. ;)
The obvious reason for doing this kind of thing is their target market & 99.9% of sales are to people using them with phones, so Jabra has no business reason to spend money providing customer support for PC interoperability.
It actually is. If you use either the Bluetooth patents or trademarks (e.g. logos and names), not only you must pass a certification that ensures this, you must also "maintain a level of quality that meets or exceeds industry standards", and this evidently doesn't.
- Zoom instructions to disable dynamic input volume - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432445/bluetooth-h...
- google meet instructions (when run via Chrome) - there's a flag you can add when starting Chrome, --force-fieldtrials='WebRTC-Audio-AgcMinMicLevelExperiment/Enabled-20' , that will fix the issue. For ease of use, create an AppleScript file, convert it to a shortcut, and launch Chrome from it.
edit - formatting
It was super annoying, as they kept muting me mid-sentence, but since turning this option I haven't faced this issue anymore.
I stopped trusting Wirecutter a long time ago when they "recommended" powerline adapters that sucked. After buying some and doing my own testing I realized the whole product category sucks unless you're super desperate with no other options.
Of course instead of saying that Wirecutter happily gives the best piece of garbage 8 or 9 stars. That's the problem with affiliate marketing blogs like Wirecutter. They'll happily do relative rankings of pure crap if it means you'll buy something for them to get the affiliate revenue.
We need a new generation of review sites and reviewers.
People will hear this and go, "aha! Crowd sourcing!" The issue with that is that with modern technology the problem is overwhelmingly user error (or to be generous, perhaps UX). So you will spend essentially all your time chasing down people who don't know how to charge their product, or have their powerline adapter hooked up upstream of a UPS, etc
Your wiring is to blame. Maybe some staple missed and nicked the wire, maybe you have something leaking EMI, maybe you just have dirty power.
The only info I found about supporting other laptops (it mentions phones, tablets, and mobile devices?) was in their help faqs:
https://www.jabra.com/supportpages/jabra-elite-85t/100-99190...
Which basically says it won't fully function... but it might work with MS teams?
I wonder what data they're collecting with the mobile app, whether it's being monetized to support development, or simply that they don't care about a fairly common use case.
But the response is infuriating. I wouldn't really expect anything else from something like Xiaomi, but Jabra? Don't they care about their reputation at all? I mean, they could at least pretend they care. Refunding a single customer is cheap as fuck, even if he is not really in the right. Well, I don't know, but I suspect this thread may already cost them more than fucking $150 or whatever it is Jabra Elite 85t costs now.
However, to be completely honest, I'm not sure what my next wireless earbuds manufacturer should be. I bought 65t's a long time ago (obviously), and I'm pretty sure nothing could really compete back then, all things considered. I don't know about now.
You can bump the volume up to the midpoint in your audio settings and it will take about another month to re-occur. Sorry this isn't a better solution.
Jabra Elite2 40 for example looked almost perfect, but was almost unusable on Linux/without their custom software.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/jght5s/sony_wh1000xm4...
With a 3rd party dongle like the Avantree DG80 you can use any bluetooth headset and don't need to worry about the Linux support part. The main disadvantage I found is that you have to manually switch between headset mode and HiFi headphones mode.
I also have the Poly Voyager 8200, but I haven't used it as a headset enough to give a definitive assessment, but based on what I've tried and the results from the other Poly products I expect it to be good.
I also tried the Poly Voyager 5200, but I didn't like the speaker sound quality with it being a single ear device.
It sounds like Avantree DG80 might solve my issues on Linux, I never realized I could outsource the entire Bluetooth audio headache to a generic dongle and get regular audio out of it.
But I have the Jabra Engage 75 (not Engage2) and I'm very happy with them. The mic doesn't pick up other voices in the house, since it sits 1 cm from my mouth and is fairly directional.
Also, the phones and base don't seem to communicate over Bluetooth because the range is great: more than 10 m through a thick house wall. I also don't notice the lag. The base is connected to the PC via USB. It also supports BT for connecting to a phone. And the volume controls on the phones affect the volume reported by Pipewire. The only thing that doesn't interact with PW is the Mic mute button. I don't have any kind of Jabra software installed - and there isn't any for Linux (they only have an SDK).
My only gripe with them is that they always prioritize my phone, so whenever I get a random notification they will cut the audio from the conference on the PC in order to play the "ding".
Have the same issue on my MBP with Sennheiser Pxa550. With Monterey I actually had to install a plug-in for Chrome that keeps my volume at max during meet calls.
List of my issues: - audio doesn't work - audio doesn't switch from call mode to HiFi mode - if I have a call running, it will not switch or work via my headphones - audio balance switches to right headphone ....
I tried every recepie and thread I found online. Nothing.
Apple sucks.
Funny thing tho, I actually have a pair of Jabra 75t. And they seem more stable than Pxa550.
Again - direct hate towards Apple. I'm guessing all works with Apple headphones, as they sprinkle that secret sauce in their drivers that nobody else has access to.
I'm running an old Philips SHB3075 with my MacBook Air M1, and it has no problems whatsoever. The connection takes a bit longer compared to my iPhone, but I think it's negotiating a lot of things over the air during that connection.
I've attended half day long meetings, and join 2 meetings on average over zoom and Skype. Nothing shifts, nothing drops.
So, BT is a complicated protocol with a lot of baggage and layers, and proper debugging is much better than finger pointing.
Jabra can update the firmware on the device, but they're lazy or there's something wrong with hardware. I own a 45 (previously called Stealth), and the family got 5-6 software updates over the years.
In both cases, it seems to be purely an issue with macOS and Apple software, as I've never had a single issue when using windows or my Android phone. For the second issue when I researched it, the conclusion was that apple just regularly does poorly with BT devices connected to multiple sources as why would you use something other than your apple product?
BUT ...
If I want to use only one at the time, it's only possible to use the right one.
If using them the whole day and re-charging one at the time or if I'd like to use the left one while driving so I can hear the family that don't work.
When I bought them it was promised it would be fixed with a software update, but no.
https://mobile.twitter.com/we_are_jabra/status/1244383330302...
For whatever reason they seem to have little issue breaking third party devices. Pre-pandemic; i had a nice usb-hub I used at work. No issues for years on my maxed 2017 rMBR. Paperweight when I finally made it back to the office (though working fine on other machines). Same with a number of misc usb-c hubs/adapters I used fine until an OSX update.
Seriously annoying.
Unfortunately, I never had any luck with any Bluetooth audio device of any manufacturer on computers (as opposed to phones/tablets).
Have you tried Samsung Buds+ or the new Galaxy buds? They have incredible battery life and decent microphones. Unfortunately they don't fit my ears so I'm using Airpods 3.
Going to guess it's a macOS bug given that other headphones are showing the same behavior
After updating Macos to Monterey
Apple has strong financial incentives to have its headphones be the preferred option across its product lines.
Considering that Jabra is getting the blame here, Apple has little financial disincentive against breaking changes to its software.
Good luck.
Which is too bad because the only thing I don't like about my Jabra 65t s after probably 1k hours of use is they don't get quiet enough, but :shrug:.
After 2 months? I guess it depends on the merchant, but I think my credit card requires that I dispute a charge within 30 days.
everything is a scam
They don't, as far as I am seeing, advertise PC compatibility. So you are out of luck there.
Return them if you can and buy something better.
Why anyone would buy their garbage is beyond me, not that that excuses how they treat their marks^Wcustomers.
They don't attempt to mislead at all.
I don't really see anything there beyond "bluetooth support", and it seems to me that expecting very common systems such as macOS and Windows would work is pretty reasonable.