Take Full Advantage Of Stereo Bluetooth

Although Bluetooth may have been the sole province of the technologically elite a few years ago, it’s an increasingly popular standard for cellular phones and other computing devices. It’s probably safe to assume that it has become mainstream.

Bluetooth uses short-range radio frequencies to allow a variety of devices (personal digital assistants, cellular phones, mice, keyboards, printers, scanners, cameras, and music players, for example) to communicate with each other and transfer or share data.

As an evolving standard, Bluetooth still has plenty of room to grow, and new and improved capabilities are still being developed for it. Bluetooth is actually composed of many different profiles, different instruction sets that are used for a variety of functions. For example, the HFP (Hands-Free Profile) is the
Bluetooth profile that enables the phone calls via wireless headsets.

Bluetooth Meets Stereo Audio
A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) is a Bluetooth profile that lets Bluetooth devices send and receive mono or stereo audio signals. In other words, it’s one more reason to throw on your wireless headset and tune out the world, because A2DP lets you listen to audio (Internet radio or MP3 files, for example) from a Bluetooth A2DP-compatible MP3 player, cell phone, or PC through a set of A2DP-compatible headphones or external speakers. Better still, you can listen to your music and pick up an incoming call without switching between headsets.

In other words, Bluetooth/A2DP gives you the freedom to listen to your music unfettered by wires. Of course, this might mean upgrading your cellular phone or buying a new Bluetooth headset.

A2DP does have some potential applications for use in the professional world. You could, for example, play the audio for a business presentation wirelessly through portable, Bluetooth-enabled speakers. That’s pretty slick and might impress a few board members, but it’s not really the type of fun for which A2DP was intended.

The primary purpose of A2DP is to free you from speaker and headphone wires, and it will likely be far more popular and useful to you in a recreational capacity. The “fun” way to use A2DP is to wirelessly pipe your favorite tunes or other audio from a PC, mobile phone or portable music player to a set of A2DP-compatible speakers or headphones.

Although most laptops and PCs aren’t Bluetooth/A2DP-compatible out of the box, you can use a simple USB dongle to add Bluetooth/A2DP functionality. You can use used two Anycom USB adapters, the USB-200 and the USB-250, to quickly and easily add Bluetooth/A2DP functionality to both a desktop and a laptop PC. The main difference between the USB-250 and the USB-200 is that the USB-250 has a maximum range of 120m, whereas the USB-200 has a maximum range of 30m. The USB-250 is also equipped with flash memory, so you can potentially upgrade it to support additional Bluetooth profiles.

Next post, we will look at how these devices works.